#big fan of his ribcage basket of bones

[ghoul-wizard]

Oh boy! The mailman is here!

[zedecksiew]

The God Mine (Part 2)

SO YOU WANT TO QUARRY A GOD’S CORPSE

Imagine your god-beast. Imagine it fall.

Draw an outline of your god’s dead body. Use an A4 sheet of graph paper. Spread its limbs out, fill the sheet up. Arrange its accoutrements in their proper places. Key any special features.

Now you have a geography of meat.

~

Parts of your god are riddled with tunnels. Its attendants, entombed with their deity, have fed on sacred carrion to survive.

Place these attendants in a lower quadrant of the sheet. Draw ant-farm chambers branching outwards. This reflects their benighted delvings. Hit all special features in the sheet’s lower half.

If there are two attendant cultures still extent, visually differentiate their chambers. They are at war. Key any blockades or fortifications.

~

Draw a circle, roughly 6 x 6 squares, onto your god’s ribcage. This is the lowest bench of the mine’s open pit; its secondary passages open from here.

Draw lightning zigzags radiating from the pit, following bone and flesh. Concentrate these in the upper-centre portion of the sheet. These are the coolies’ haphazard workings.

Have one of the mine heads breach an attendant tunnel. First contact was recent, and not pleasant.

+

DO YOU HAVE PERMISSION TO BE HERE?

This mine has been requisitioned by the Jinn Prince. Its output is reserved for his exclusive use.

Day-to-day operations are left to Arnuvar san Shar, scholar and awful fop – gold hand fan, cloak of gold-ring mail, and:

1: Gold-plated moustache. Worn for subterfuge. Arnuvar is a woman. The scandal will harm everybody associated with her. Voice Grenade, at will. 2: Gold keris. Hilt a hornbill head. The human is a servitor. Arnuvar is the keris – a sentient member of the Hundred-Angled Edge. Skilled fighter. 3: Gold slippers. Arnuvar glides. A jinn in disguise. Hates the Jinn Prince, but spell-bound to exaggeratedly declare loyalty. Command Limb, at will. 4: Gold pince-nez. Arnuvar is a spy for the Governor-Admiral, trying to catch the Jinn Prince at subversive activity. Zone of Jejune Blather, at will. 5: Gold neck-rings. Hiding a garrotte-like scar. Arnuvar is a penanggalan. He gets children up to his bungalow. They do not come back. Suggestion, at will. 6: Gold hearing horn. A lie detector. Arnuvar casts no shadow. A hologram projection of the Jinn Prince himself. Cannot interact with physical objects.

Also Purify Air, at will; five random spells; and a squad of foremen in gilt armour.

~

Bamboo trestles criss-cross the dig site. A big iron box sits by its lip. Chained to the ground, watched by heavily-padded guards – the box shudders.

You hear:

1: Angry, elephantine snorting. A work makara. Mole-like foreclaws, pickaxe tusks, and a toothy, sucker-ed trunk. 2: Sobbing. An anti-medusa, lying foetal on a cot. Blindfolded. The eyes of every snake on her head have been put out. 3: Happy gurgling like a just-drained sink. Undines, imported from a distant land. Their water jets cut stone and steel. 4: Snoring. Brass dwarves in a drunk tank. Between this and violent sobriety, they are the best miners in the world. 5: Silence, like soil. A grub giant. Loose, it gently lumbers towards the tunnels, every footprint full of wriggling things. 6: Teeth-gritting, scraping metal. A slaved mechanomid, folding out drill-bitted arms, one after another after another.

~

Coolies line up in front of the change house. They are many, gore-crusted, and unwell. They are:

1: Whispering. Enough of the foremen’s whips! Looking to bargain with the powers they have found, underground. 2: Disappearing. They have dug a hidden passage; it opens out onto a nearby hillside. Not just the coolies are escaping. 3: Cursed. Gory, fatal misfortune. Management has taken notice; the frequency of accidents has been hurting productivity. 4: Moulting. Bad energies are morphing them into termite-men. One of the sorting-girls has already become a queen. 5: Fanatical. They feast on the god they are defiling. They have made a religion of it. Their diet lets them perform miracles.   6: Each possessed by an echo of the god-beast’s soul. Each approaches you, alone, hissing: “I am a god! Get me out of here!”

+

DOWN IN THE GOD-MINE

You stumble in the stink. It is like offal stuffed into your mouth, stuck up both nostrils. The darkness ahead is:

1: Scored white. Bone of a god / bone-coloured granite. The miners gave up, and went around. 2: Rushing. Blood from a vein / blood in an underground wash. Where does the stream flow? 3: Striated red. Rigor-mortis muscle / layer-cake limestone. Breaks in chunks, if struck right. 4: Pillowy yellow. Fatty, bouncy tissue / soft, wet clay. Slipping is not a matter of if, but when. 5: Accordioned. Tract lined with villi / speleothem-ed channel. Easy to get your feet caught. 6: Voluminous. A hall-sized organ / exhaling chasm. Way across is makeshift, and wobbling.

And then you hear:

1: A clatter. Your shoe kicked a basket. Mining tools: picks, flasks. Perhaps their owners are ahead? 2: Clicking, like fingernails on a cup. A pack of giant centipedes, now springing their ambuscade. 3: Liquid sounds, like when you swallow spit. Undead leukocytes, still fighting off foreign infection. 4: Gas sighs. A ghost composed of firedamp, invisible, begging you to give its body proper burial. 5: Cracking, then the pressure and on-rush of weight. A cave-in. It will take effort and hours to clear. 6: Words in a language too old to be human. You are about to face the god-beast’s pre-fall attendants.

+++

( Image sources:

https://www.ehm.my/data/economic-history/about-tin-mining http://joechelliah.blogspot.my/2016/03/pekans-and-bandars-in-malaya-their.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_mining http://www.exposureguide.com/inspiration/dark-marble-mines-illuminated-by-light-painted-balls/ )