[Round One, Set Seven] Prey To Chaos

It was Chaos. A realm of Chaos just sitting there, waiting for some unknowing person to stumble into its twisting paths and trap them within, psychologically damage them then spit them back out to try to make sense of the world. Not many did after being in Chaos’ embrace though.

There was only ever one entry into Chaos, and being its nature you never realised until you stepped through a normal doorway and landed somewhere you weren’t meant to be. From then on, you were stuck in an ever-changing realm that defied the laws of physics and structural form; indeed Chaos seemed to be making a mockery of all things considered normal and bound by law.

~.~

The archway was the first of two signs of trouble.

Joker stared at it, and though he had no reasonable reason why, looking at it made him feel queasy. It was like a heat haze hung over the thing, making his eyes ache as he perused it.

None the less, it appeared normal. Beyond it was the gardens he was about to enter, nothing drastically different or out of place. Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that stepping through would cause something extraordinary to happen.

Running his hands through his unruly hair, he stepped forward resolutely and felt instant regret at his choice in doing so.

He was not in the gardens. At least, not the ones he had meant to enter. Oh and gravity had changed on him, causing him to fall upwards.

“AIIiiiii~!!!” Joker yelped as he was flung against a very hard stairway. Shaking his head, he sat up and blinked at the floor beneath him. He was upside down, on stairs that led up into the sky. Gingerly, he stood, feeling a distinct sense of displacement with the floor above his head and his body at angles to it that shouldn’t be possible.

Looking around, he saw it was the same everywhere. Stairways at odd angles, some upside down like his, others side ways and more vertical. Only a few of them were in relation to the ground below… or above him in this case.

At odd intervals were flat planes – some held gardens full of plants Joker had never seen before, other had pools of water floating in midair contained by nothing, with fish swimming through lazily. Staring at one of these planes, Joker started when he saw it shifting and then morphing, becoming a desert with sand blowing across it and sending a gush of heat in his direction.

A sense of adventure gripped him suddenly, and he looked around and laughed. It was the kind of world he thrived in really, full of such strange things that would make a mind boggle as it tried to understand what was happening.

Joker didn’t care. As he bounded up the stairs then flipped over to another set, the field of gravity changing again so he was relevant to that new ground, he laughed. In response, happy flowers blossomed where he stood, a hint that whatever he felt would influence the world he was in.

What he didn’t see was the little thorns that grew within them, dripping a sickly green fluid to the stairs that hissed on contact. He didn’t notice how the fish stared as he bounded past, the forward eyes of a predator eyeing him from behind a thin veil of water.

What Joker did notice was the huge lobster like creature blocking his path; a creature that had the crushing pincers of its look-alike but a machine gun on its back, aiming directly at Joker. The young man paused, staring at its beady eyes and realised exactly what it was he stared at.

“Joker loves lobster stew~!” his enthusiastic response earned him a sudden splatter of gun fire, gun fire he neatly evaded as he leaped to another stair way and rolled, the bullets upon entering the new gravity field slamming hard into the stairs as their trajectory was interrupted.

Yes, the second sign of trouble was creatures and wildlife of this realm - creatures both organic and machine; a mix that would not survive in other worlds but only in this one seemed to thrive.

As Joker withdrew his daggers, and prepared to battle, he was unaware of a third danger. The danger of ones thoughts and feelings, which were manifested and then warped to become sinister, such as those flowers his feelings of enthusiasm had evoked.

Yes, it was a realm of Chaos and Chaos loved nothing more than to play with its prey and turn them against themselves.

Lilith stepped through the archways of blackness, her heart full of disgust. This place she was in had ocne been a holy ground, but she had used her dark powers to warp it into something she found sinisteringly beautiful. She cocked a smile at her handy work, it was truly something she took great joy in. Chaos, I thrive off of it. Chaos is beautiful, chaos is wonderful, chaos is who I am!

Lilith outstretched her purple wings and yawned. the creation of her masterpiece had made her exhausted but she merely brushed it off. She had come to this place in hopes of finding her "gateway to the Chaos Realm" as one of those mindless human grunts had told her. Lilith was a master of chaos, and finding this chaos realm would only feed her chaoticness.

She continued walking, looking for this so called gateway, but to her dismay found nothing. I should have figured that human scum was ly- . . . Hmm what do we have here? Lilith walked towards a rune engraved in the ground. The swirling winds, the clashing waves, the jagged earth, from what she could make of it, this was a chaos rune. Perhaps she had indeed found her portal, or perhaps this was what would lead her to her portal to the chaos realm.

She touched the rune, feeling its every detail, but nothing. She could not feel the chaos within the rune so perhaps it was just a stone slab. Lilith stood up and spit on the rune then scoffed her heel on it, it was of no importance if it did not hold what she wanted to claim. And then something else caught her eye, another rune quiet a ways down the pathway of which she was walking. She searched that one, which had the display of fire swirling around wood, burning it to nothing but soot.

She followed the stones, one after another appearing as she touched them. They lead Lilith to an archway, and this one was not black from her work, but purple. They say purple is the colour of chaos and time. But in chaos, time is of no importance. Lilith walked through the archway, and what she saw on the other side was what she had not expected. Blood splattered on the ground, smoldering corpses, the things that made Lilith all giddy inside.

She continued to walk through the piles of corpses on the blood stained cobblestone. She felt like letting out laughter, for this amused her so. Lilith let out one of her devilish grins, but she couldn't help but feel a slight sense of dreed. This place was interesting, but was it the realm of chaos?

Lilith looked around, and watched the entire place change on her entirely, into staircases, many of them. Some were upside down, right side up, diagonal, verticle, horizontal and misshapen. the gravity was also strange, pulling at her from entirely different directions. She was water trickling upwards, along with plants and flowers with an upside down tree.

"This is chaos, I am finally here." Lilith continued walking through the place, making sure to keep her footing with the ever so changing gravity on her body. It looked like nothing was here, but she knew better than to suspect that.

“Joker loves lobster stew~!”

Lilith turned her head in the direction of which the voice came, but saw nothing. But if she truly wanted to conquer the realm of chaos, she would need to kill anything and everything her. These dark thoughts filled Lilith's head, and she would not let herself be conquered by this realm. Dark votexes began to swirl around her body, since the realm of chaos manifested a persons throughts, the darkness of her mind was giving birth to these dark vortexes.

"I will kill anyone who stands in my way, and destroy every last living creature that crosses my path!"

Lilith began to make her way in the direction of the voice, a dark orb in her hand. She didn't care how she killed this person, so long as this person was dead cold. Murdering in cold blood, she could careless, if he, for the voice had been masculine, put up a fight, then Lilith would take even more pleasure in destroying the fool.

"I shall rule this realm, and the next, and no one shall stop me from my goal!" Lilith let out a slight maniacle laugh, she was in control she knew that much, but for how long would she be in control of this chaos realm, she did not know.

Tanya lay sprawled face-down on the sofa, snoring loudly. Her one arm hung off the edge of the upholstery, still clutching a half-empty beer bottle. The remnants of the one-person party from earlier were scattered over a small table next to her. There was an open pizza box with a few pieces remaining, surrounded by at least a dozen empty beer bottles.

Her eyes slowly blinked open and she clutched her head with one hand, rubbing her forehead. She set the bottle down on the floor and sat up on her knees, stretching languishly and then rubbing her eyes. She was dressed solely in a long shirt and a pair of boxers, her usual outfit for the night.

Getting to her feet, she headed off towards the kitchen for a glass of water, still clutching her head which was throbbing in the wake of a hangover. Bringing the glass to her lips and taking a sip, she looked back at where she had come from, and she narrowed her eyes at what she saw.

The space under the corridor arch that led to her living room seemed to glisten with a kind of iridescent surface. It was almost like a film of soap separating the kitchen from the lounge. Curious, she placed her glass on the counter beside her and walked up to it.

To her surprise, as she could no longer see her living room through the ethereal membrane as she drew closer to it. Instead, she could see a large stage illuminated by bright lights, a huge crowd gathered in front of it and cheering ecstatically, and a band - was that Iron Maiden? - performing on-stage.

Tanya rubbed her eyes in utter disbelief, but the image was still there when she lowered her hands. She considered the sheer absurdity of it all, but her curiosity seemed to have taken the better of her. Against her better judgement (or was it the booze doing more of the thinking for her?), she decided to cross the threshold.

The moment she stepped through the translucent curtain, she found herself spinning in mid-air, falling sideways. She landed hard on her bottom, blinking in surprise as she observed her surroundings. Slowly rising to her feet, her jaw dropped as all her knowledge of physics suddenly seemed to become void.

Stairwells branched in all directions over a cyan backdrop, bending and twisting in erratic directions, ignoring gravity. Or rather, gravity seemed to forsake the concept of direction altogether. Rubbing her pained bottom, Tanya started walking down - or was it up - the nearest flight of stairs, wondering exactly how many beers she had drank.

The particular stairwell eventually led her to what appeared to be a desert plain suspended in midair. Part of it overlapped with the stairwell she was on, covering a number of steps with a thick layer of sand. Arching an eyebrow, she stepped onto the sand with slight apprehension, her bare toes sinking into the hot sand.

The familiar sound of gunfire suddenly erupted in her ears, and a slew of hot lead grazed the ground at her feet. Reacting out of instinct, she jumped onto the adjacent plane and rolled behind a rock for cover. Her hands immediately went to her sides, searching for her trusty weapons, only to go wide-eyed with the realisation that she wasn't armed.

Looking over the rock, she saw what appeared to be a gargantuan lobster with a minigun growing out of its shell. The montser was attacking a young man with bluish hair, who seemed intent on fending it off with only a handful of knives. Tanya knew that those things had no chance to pierce that exoskeleton. Turning around, she slumped against the rock, wondering what exactly she had gotten herself into and why she didn'r her guns along, fuming over the fact that she was only wearing a pair of boxers and a shirt in a freaking desert of who-knows where.

That's when she noticed the pair of black pistols forming at either side of her, etched with strange red runes along their surface. Arching an eyebrow, she picked up the two weapons and tested them; they felt almost perfect in her grip. At that moment, a black mist started to form around her body, coalescing into a pair of black army boots with red laces and a tight black pair of short shorts. Her shirt also began to shrink, its colour turning into black with a red star in the center.

Not knowing where all these had come from nor really caring why they had, she rose to her feet with a satisfied grin and headed off towards the blue-haired guy, a pistol in each hand.