1. Mausoleums are the hearts of manifested unreality.
- The larger area of unreality is sort of an egg, a defensive shell around the juicy yolk.
- All effects of the unreality are enhanced further within the domain of the Mausoleum.
- A Mausoleum is not bound to the same sizing dimensions as the outer unreality. It can be larger. Records have shown Mausoleums up to five times larger than the manifested unreality.
2. A mausoleum is the last defense of the corpse.
- Even in a manifested unreality that is overall non-hostile, the Mausoleum will do its best to eject any intruders.
- Research is inconclusive if the purpose of the rest of the unreality is manifested to sustain the mausoleum.
3. Please escape the closing Mausoleum.
- While destroying the corpse reverts the manifested unreality surrounding it, the Mausoleum is so detached from our base reality that failure to leave can have one trapped in another reality.
- Currently, five people are known to have unsuccessfully escaped a Mausoleum after successfully disposing of the corpse.
- There are no known means of accessing nor communicating with those lost in collapsing Mausoleums.
There were too many people. Jericho kept his gun angled on them, taking their measure. Familiar forms, contemporary clothing, modern haircuts. Two eyes, one nose, two ears. Normal as normal could be, but normal ceased to exist when a corpse wasn’t proper disposed of.
Beads of sweat ran down his forehead, but his arm was steady. This wasn’t the first time he’d aimed at people, and it wouldn’t be the last. One didn’t survive past their first unreality incursion if they weren’t ready to spill the blood of the presumed innocent.
The three people kept moving towards him, faces flat, devoid of emotion. There was no recognition in their gazes for the gun fixed in their direction. One opened its mouth to speak.
“@#$^%!” A human tongue could not make those sounds. The gun kicked in Jericho’s hands, the bullet whizzing through the air towards the collective. It collided into the closest one with a loud thunk, ricocheting off into the distance. There was no flesh wound. A fragment split off, lazily resting on the sidewalk. The outside looked like the exterior of a shirt covering the curvature of the shoulder. Not a separate fabric clinging to skin, but clothing colored and textured flesh. The underside was like marble, which matched the open wound. If he stared too long at the exposed ‘flesh’, his eyes started to heat up.
The ‘man’ continued without a care, still babbling in that unnatural tongue while advancing, and the more the words were said, the more Jericho’s ears started to tingle.
“I hope this works,” he muttered, running back down the street to the center, hands fumbling with the manhole. He brought his gun next to the man-made object and let out a silent prayer to anyone listening.
The manhole shivered, rumbling around the perimeter of its confines before vanishing altogether. He wasn’t sure if it would be real enough for his oracle, but he wasn’t about to complain. Jericho pumped his left arm and pivoted about, gun pointing straight at the still-advancing.
“Last warning,” he said, wasting his breath. But they continued as they had before. Unerring, uncaring. Even the one that had been shot showed no difference in appearance barring its exposed marble flesh, and Jericho wanted nothing less than to be caught by them.
Their steps were without haste. They carried an inexorable slant in their approach, certain that their arrival could only be delayed, not stopped. Jericho was ready to prove them wrong.
He pulled the trigger and the gun kicked once again, a manhole sized bullet squeezing out of the chamber. It whirled through the air, and for a moment, he thought he could see their eyes widen. The massive bullet slammed through the the leftmost “person”, coming out clearly through the other side before lodging in the guts of a stray restaurant. The brick wall exterior crumbled, the impact severing any stability the normally imposing wall once carried.
Jericho hoped that there weren’t any civilians hunkering down in the building—he didn’t realize his oracle would make the shot that effective—but he didn’t have enough room for half measures.
The remaining “people” looked at one another, still wearing their flat faces, but their words faded away, motion put to rest. Maybe it was a new-found sense of mortality, or maybe it was an understanding that this was not a winning match-up and they weren’t ready to advance if the outcome wasn’t in their favor.
“Oh, so you understand reason now?” Jericho grunted, still pointing the gun at the “people”. His arm shook, the recoil of the shot fiercer than he had expected. For all that his oracle had crafted a miracle from garbage, it didn’t free him fully from the laws of physics.
They didn’t answer, which he felt was likely for the best. His ears had started ringing in what he could only assume was hearing damage, something Jericho had managed to avoid for the last 10 years with judicious wearing of ear plugs and lower volume with his headsets.
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“Very well then. I won’t shoot you any further if you don’t give me any more trouble, capeesh?”
There was the slightest suggestion of a solitary eye twitching, and for Jericho, that was enough. He continued down the street, walking backwards with his gun still trained on the ‘people’. A sickening thought erupted as they left his line of sight—what if they were regular civilians corrupted by the corpse instead of constructs generated in this neck of unreality?
It wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened. There was poor Milly the Marionette, as the newspapers had taken to calling her. Her corpse had taken over the better part of the theater distract in NYC. She had no family left in the area and the local government had failed to do their wellness checks when she hadn’t left her apartment in a week. Pure negligence, really.
Her corpse had manifested a sort of unreality where all of the people still present in the area where conscripted into a sort of play. They were conscious while forced to act, and the roles assigned weren’t always positive ones. There were lovers forced into opposing roles—a survivor had recounted on NPR how they had to hack off each limb and lap at the blood, and no amount of therapy would wash away the memory of their lover’s eyes, that little twinkle within like an attempt at absolution from the buried personality.
The Corpse Hour show was taken off the air by the end of the year after that episode.
For his own sake, he had to believe that the “people” were solely constructs of the unreality. Maybe a rank 3 would have had some sort of corrupting effect, but a rank 2 could only exert so much influence.
At least, that’s how he rationalized it to himself.
The further into the territory he went, the more “people” he ran into, and they had the good temerity to not mess with him. He didn’t know—couldn’t know, really, how they were communicating amongst one another. Was there a shared consciousness? Or were they just properly aware of what a threat looked like.
It didn’t matter, in the end. As long as they stayed out of his way, Jericho was confident he could clear the unreality in no time. It wasn’t as though he had any competition.
At least, he didn’t, up until his phone rang.
With a groan, he fished the device out of his pocket, reading the updated notification from the Bureau.
“Note: Bureau agents have entered the corpse manifestation.”
He still didn’t understand whatever kind of oracle was being squandered to allow messages to successfully passed between realities, but the Bureau had been faithful in their updates. If they finally got an agent here, he’d have to work faster.
Nothing he’d passed by had suggested any connection to the corpse’s Mausoleum, and if he couldn’t find it, the Bureau agent would certainly be the one to would co-opt the relic. He couldn’t let it happen. He had to resolve the corpse disposal.
Jericho needed everything he could get if he was ever going to resolve the commingled corpses of Abe and Sarah. He had to. For Mordecai’s sake.
“Stop right there,” a voice shouted across the street. Jericho came to a sudden halt, craning his neck for the speaker.
“Oh fuck,” he cursed under his breath.
What were the odds that the employee the Bureau sent over was none other than Agent Ride? She wore her standard suit—a Bureau employee could look nothing less than their best—without any extra flair to individualize it. She viewed herself as a cog in the machine, nothing more, nothing less. Her hair was neatly coiffed in a bun, strands bound to the back of her head with a simple hair tie. She was the epitome of professionalism, which is why she liked nothing more than to bust Jericho’s balls.
She didn’t need a weapon. He’d already had enough first hand experience with her oracle to be certain of that. She was a potent fighter, and well suited to the proper disposal of corpses.
Which made it all the more curious that she was allocated to this rank 2 manifestation instead of being literally anywhere else.
She inched closer, a brilliant white flame sitting on the palm of her right hand. “Are you the one that caused the corpse to manifest?”
“Wait, what? No. Don’t be daft, Agent Ride. Why in the world would I do that?”
The question was frankly, insulting, but that was typical behavior from her. In her zealous quest to be the perfect agent, she doubted everyone and anyone. No stone could be left unturned.
“Why do most villains do what they do? For evil, of course.”
Jericho rolled his eyes. “I’ve barely even been in the area. How could I be responsible?”
“Don’t be daft. You could have stored the corpse ahead of time so that you could be here when it manifested.”
Okay, maybe that was a credible hypothesis for why one could want to improperly dispose of a corpse, but Jericho took umbrage in those motivations being ascribed to him.
“How very dare you. You know I would never.”
“You’d do anything for Mordecai—“
Jericho’s gun locked onto Agent Ride. “Is that a threat? Has the government finally decided to revoke my license?”
“Woah, calm down. You definitely don’t seem like one of the mirror creatures. You’re good.”
Jericho blinked.
“Excuse me? You were testing me?”
“You say that like being cautious in a zone of unreality is foolish.”
Okay, maybe she had a point, but that didn’t excuse her name-dropping Mordecai.
“In what world do I seem like those mindless things who only speak like they were processed through a fax machine that was fed the input of a bivalve used to monitor pollution levels?”
“See, you could have just led with that nonsense.”
Jericho did his best to refrain from attacking the government agent. He’d have to have a long conversation with his therapist in the following days.
“What even made you think I was one of them?”
Whatever cheer Agent Ride carried vanished into the air. “I’ve seen those weird marble fellows, and I’ve seen, well, me. It was dressed like me, and more frustratingly, it sounded like me. I spoke in a similar manner, although it was all very surface level. It couldn’t know anything that existed outside of this area.”
Jericho shuddered at the idea of what could have happened if this was a higher rank unreality. There’d been a few cases where elements broke out.
The aftermath in those areas was spectacularly horrific.
His gun slid back into his holder, and he crossed his arms, lost in thought. “Where did you see that, uh, doppelganger of yours? And did you destroy it?”
“Oh, I came in from the northern gate. And of course I destroyed it. This is why I don’t trust you independent contractors. You’re willing to do a half-assed job.”
The thought of beefing further with Agent Ride was always appealing, but her testimony was the lead that Jericho needed. If he could just diffuse the situation, he’d be one step closer to claiming that artifact.”
“Oh, well. I came from the southern gate. Thanks. Now I don’t have to retread the area you already investigated.”
Agent Ride beamed. “Why, that’s some clever thinking from you finally. Maybe you aren’t so bad, Jericho.”
He grunted and nodded, giving her a curt wave. “Right you are. Right you are. Now if you don’t mind… I can’t leave Mordecai home alone all day. I’ve gotta continue searching.”
“Of course, go ahead and waste your time!” the Bureau agent said. She started skipping down the street in the opposite direction, confident that nothing in the unreality could harm her and frankly? Jericho wasn’t sure what could get past her oracle. She had good cause to be so blasé.
In her hubris, she failed to realize how unusual it was to see such a faithful recreation. That had to be where the Mausoleum was around. If he could find a more proper duplicate, then he’d be within arm’s length of resolving this corpse disposal and heading back home, spoils of war in hand.
He lightly jogged up the street, looking out of the corner of his eye before sprinting back north, back to where Agent Ride had given up her chances of properly disposing of the corpse.