Fire is Light…

… from which the truth must ignite.

So apparently Picasso made her own account. As far as I can tell she doesn’t have a blog and she doesn’t have any followers but she has an account. All the better to rant with, I suppose. To those who are curious as to why she keeps calling West a bear, it’s because he looks like one.  That asshole is a big burly, nightmarish beast in both stature and muscle mass. I’d dare say he is far more muscle than man if I thought that sentence would make any sense.

Limb snapping Maniac.

Speaking of betrayers,
I keep breaking my oath of silence. I don’t remember not talking being so difficult. I remember when I didn’t need words for anything and there wasn’t a situation I couldn’t wear a mask for. I remember when writing felt like a moral sin to my oath that I only practiced in an effort to finish the stories of the slain. Now it’s a mandatory fucking order that I stick on an imaginary wall for all of the world to see. When did I become so weak and co-dependent?

I bet getting me to break my oath was Fracture’s plan. He just kept calling me a dog until I snapped.
That fucker showed up to help with clearing the list. He didn’t actually get to help us though. I beat the shit out of him while yelling something to the effect of, “CALL ME A DOG ONE MORE TIME AND I WILL FUCKING END YOU.”

When I was done he disappeared. He popped out like he likes to do. Such a cowardly fucking ability. I use to hate that I wasn’t allow to path around like I see so many other proxies do, Firecracker and Trent included, but this talking thing has shown me that it would only be another crutch. At the end of the day I’m better off without it.

I suppose I’m burying the lead here though.
My list has once again been cleared and all six marks are once again dealt with. We used actual planning this time around. We scouted out each mark and figured out where each one slept and took out every single one of them within the same hour once we had their patterns down well enough. We left them no time to find out something was wrong and regroup. There was just swift silent death. Not the kind of death I prefer to give but at the end of the day it’s about results. Besides, I have weak ass squad mates to keep alive. Trent and Firecracker almost didn’t survive our last head on fight with a group so it’s best we play it safe… for now.

That’s not to say none of them put up a fight.
That first guy woke up as Trent and I were sneaking up. He grabbed a knife from under his pillow and rushed into the doorway to use as a choking point to fight us from, which wasn’t a bad strategy and he was a rather competent at defending himself with a knife.

The greatest problem with that strategy is you root yourself to the ground and make yourself inflexible. I may not have been able to penetrate his pillar of defense but by god I could knock it over, and so I did. I plowed into him and ripped his knife away from him once I had him pinned to the ground. And that was when the little girl came out.

“Sally dear, run!”

Little Sally Newbery, the whole reason we hit this house first and I came to handle it personally.

I pointed at her and tapped the crack in my mask to indicate she was to be taken to Fracture rather than harmed. I turned to finish her dad when I heard a stomping noise behind me. I turned to find Trent madder than I had ever seen him before. No longer did his eyes appear cold and soulless. I saw rage, pure fiery rage.

He dove onto the little girl and forced his knife into her and then let her drop as he pulled her dad over to him and disappeared with him into the path.

I went over to her. She was dying.

“Where is father…?” she forced out coughing, clinging onto me.

I figured I had already broken my oath once today, no harm in doing it again. So I started to answer, “He-”
But I was interrupted.

“Daddy said Father would keep us safe… h-help me, f-father…”

And then she went still. I let her drop again. I didn’t have time to process that information. Assuming Firecracker had taken out her first mark, there were still three more marks left and with Trent gone in such a huff I had to make sure they all went down before too much time had passed.

Fortunately Trent showed back up as his soulless empty self again and everyone signaled in their success. Besides that first encounter with Sally and her dad, there were no notable incidents to report.

I was curious why this group didn’t seem to have a base of some sort like the last one until I went back to investigate Sally’s house. I found their basement had been turned into a bunker complete with another small armory, an array of computers, and a table with a dissected body laying across it.

Further inspection confirmed my fears. Trent tried to hide it but I found a little mask in Sally’s room and another mask in her fathers. And then I barged in on Firecracker trying to hide away the other 4 masks form the other four marks. These people were proxies and apparently I was the only one who wasn’t aware of it.

Trent and Firecracker both drew their weapons.
I hadn't actually been planning to fight them but if they were so eager I was happy to oblige. I won’t get deep into the details of that one. The cliff notes are I tazed the shit out of Trent and planted my fist into Firecrackers gut and left her winded. With the stooges taken care of it was time to pay Fracture a visit.

I found him at our agreed rendezvous point interrogating Sally’s dad. He was quick to put a gag in his mouth when I came in.

“Shouldn’t you be out collecting information for me?”

I threw out Sally’s mask for him to see.

“I knew she was going to ruin this for me. It’s always the children with you Duckie, ever since Moth.”

I punched the wall hard at the mention of that name. He recoiled back, the memory of his beating fresh in his head.

“Settle down boy… that wasn’t intentional! Don’t hit me!”  he yelled as I cracked my knuckles.

“So you found out. So what? Does this change anything? I’m still the one who gives you your orders. Are you going to start questioning them again?”

I stopped.

“And it’s not as though we don’t have the Master’s blessing. I mean just look back at today. You saw me pop away. I couldn’t do that if I had fallen out of grace.”

I tilted my head.

“Confused? It’s because you’re still questioning and fighting things, still holding back which is so ironic coming from captain let lose! Just let go and be happy. I know your feelings on the Bureaucracy. I think it’s time you made good on expressing them without words like I know you like to.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why was this kept from me if you knew I would be on board?”

“For fun. I wanted to test all that conviction you like to claim you have. You’ve already started on this with me. Got to finish it now, isn’t that right?”

I punched the wall again. “…Yes.” And then left.

It’s bothersome how incredibly in my head he seems to be which wouldn't be half as bad if it wasn't for that insufferable fucking grin of his.

Back to work I suppose, I have an accidental rebellion to fight.
Ugly Duck out.

An Unknown

Well it seems I was wrong. I made a comment on Ember’s blog the other day stating my distain for chess metaphors because they don’t really apply in the whole mask/jogger dynamic, in my opinion at least. About an hour later Trent showed up and handed me an open laptop with a game preloaded and set up.

I’m not really much for games but the title on the top little bar for the game read ‘Slender Chess’ and the opposing player’s name thing read ‘frac.4.ture’.  Figured I might was well try, if for no other reason to see if I couldn’t get something to rub in Fracture’s stupid grinning face the next time I see him.

The game was about what you would expect. It was chess with the Master sitting in the middle of the board as a small figurine with many tendrils coming off of his back. For some reason we weren’t white and black, our pieces were orange and blue. The only white and black piece was the Master and he was both. I also noticed that I had an extra Pawn and an extra Queen piece. My guess was that was necessary to spread the board out wider so there was a middle place for the Master, although Fracture explained it as never being able to have enough Queens. Makes sense I guess; those are powerful pieces.

Every round I would get a turn, Fracture would get a turn, and then the Master would get a turn. The Master piece was weird. I would move next to another piece each turn. It didn’t seem to have any movement restrictions. It went where it wanted to.  After a few rounds it started killing pieces. After it moved next to them it would step into their square and then rip them apart in a slow and rather gruesome animation. It didn’t do that often though, just occasionally.

Then occasionally a piece it moved next to would turn black and start attacking the other pieces. I tried attacking the Master with a pawn at one point. The pawn died. It entered the Masters square and was ripped to shreds. I tried it with a queen too.  It was a bit gorier the second time. I did note I could kill the black pieces though, although if they were closer to Fractures side I tried to leave them be in hopes they would pick on him instead. I had some mixed results there.

At one point I moved a Knight next to the Master and watched as my piece killed over for what seemed to be no apparent reason. I accused Fracture of cheating. He explained that some people simply can’t stand in the presence of the Master because it would kill them and apparently that Knight was one of those pieces. I’m pretty sure Fracture was covering his ass because he’s a dirty fucking cheater.

Also, the king became a lot less useless in this version. If you could move your king next to a blackened piece, it would turn to that king’s color. Fracture ended up with 3 Rooks at one point using that rule that he couldn’t be bothered to explain to me before he did it.

The game kind of felt like a big waste of time at the end. Neither Fracture nor I won. We had lost too many pieces and it turned into a Stalemate. Honestly, if the game had gone on any longer I think the black pieces would have checkmated us, you know if that was possible. Can’t be sure, it didn’t happen. Although the game did have some sort of point system because the numbers next to my name were bigger than Fracture’s at the end, so I guess I’ll take that as a victory.

That little game was so interesting I almost forgot just how mad at Fracture I was. I was reminded when he congratulated me on my victory.

'Good job mutt.' the message read.
That fucker keeps treating me like a dog and I don’t know where the fuck he’s getting it from. He just started doing it right out of the fucking blue. I’m kind of glad he isn’t here; I think I’d snap his neck… a couple of times.

“Be sure you stay out of those files pup, I can’t have you pawing your wet little nose into them and making a mess.”
Quite frankly, he’s lucky I didn’t send him a broken computer coated in Trent’s blood.

A part of me really wants to know what it is he thinks he can hide from me but at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter. I’ll not have myself fall back into petty little paranoid distractions.

I just need to focus on my actual mission.

…

Huh. New message from Fracture.

'Why are you still at the school mutt? Shouldn’t you be out hunting?'

And look at that, five new marks on the list… apparently they’ve been there since Wednesday.

...I really need to work on this focus thing. I blame Fracture.

QUIT TREATING ME LIKE A DOG YOU FUCK!
Ugly D[og]k out! [Bark, Bark!]

“I Just Want To Set The World On Fire...

…But first, I’m going to rip out your heart.”

Fracture should be shitting himself right about now.

Arbitrary news flash, Firecracker is back and bitchier than ever. It just wasn’t quite the same around here without a third untrustable subordinate to have to worry about. I say third because it occurs to me that I shouldn’t be trusting Trent.

I’m not sure how I overlooked that particular detail but it occurred to me recently that while Trent comes off as hollowed and harmless, there is still supposedly an actual person in there and not just any person. There’s supposedly a person whose life I changed in some way. So odds are about 99:1 that he secretly and ever silently wishes to gut me, which is about a point worse than the 98:2 odds of this in proxies I haven’t wronged in some way.

And you see, the more I think about it the more Trent reminds me of a proper mask. He doesn’t ever talk, he doesn’t make noise when he walks, he never fucking takes his mask off, and in hindsight I think he’s been scarring himself to teach himself lessons. I’m not sure why I thought he was doing that because he hated himself for being a hollow. Hollows can’t hate, they aren’t people after all. If he really is a Mask, that leaves some very interesting possibilities on who it could be if he's someone from my past.

I’m half tempted to sit down with Trent and skin him slowly for answers on who he is exactly but I recently gave up talking again. I would hate to fall back into the habit after I just gave it up.



On a far less trivial note, something seems to be up with my list again.
It’s not quite as bad as the never ending onslaught of red marks I had to deal with over a short period during the summer but it is just as alarming. My list has gone almost entirely empty. There are six people on it. Short of where to find them it has little to no information about them and each mark has a little post note informing me to collect and bring back as much information from the targets as physically possible following their termination, and if at all possible to have Trent and Firecracker bring one in alive for questioning.

This is starting to feel very Kreegery. I swear to god if I lose another entire week of my life, Trent dies.

Ugly Duck Out.