Topic: What's that smell?

Martin Gilcrest

Date: 2009-07-29 08:56 EST
In response to: Sinister Plot.

Someone had dumped an entire truckload of rotten eggs off the side of the road, Martin was sure of it. "Something really reeks around here," he complained nasally. The self-styled demolitions expert sat on the back of a motorcycle, on the shoulder of a dirt highway, twenty miles east by northeast of the city, plugging his nose shut by squeezing his nostrils together with gloved fingers.

Being a bit of a mad scientist, he had come out this far fully planning on experimenting with his latest array of decorative fireworks. The whole bundle of them were tied up tight to the back of the seat. He had driven this far, into a cloud of absolute putrescence, and stopped his bike with the silly notion of examining the cause.

There wasn't actually a cloud, mind, but the rancid odor was so thick in the air that there might as well been. Kicking down the stand, he dismounted his bike and walked along the shoulder of the road searching for the source. He did not, yet, dare take his hand away from his nose. This of course made it extremely difficult for him to fiddle with the buttons of his wrist scwatch. An invention of his own design.

"Ugh," he complained. "Ew. Augh. What I wouldn't give for some coff— Wait. I have coffee. Who'm I fooling?" From one of his pockets he retrieved a bottle of coffee beans, flipped off the lid, and held the little container right up under his nose. He took one long deep whiffing inhale of the sweet aroma of fresh roast, and afterward was capable of breathing a little better.

"Aaaaah. Okay. So." Recapping the bottle, he kept it tucked against his palm while pressing the buttons on the device he wore around his wrist. "Let's see what we've got here."

The wrist scwatch was a little bigger than a regular wrist watch. The face was a wide square that covered the entire underside of his knobby wrist. The band was just as wide and made of leather, ensuring that it stayed firmly attached. Anyone looking at it from the top, just under his sleeve it probably looked like some new age punk wrist band of no particular importance. However, the little computer chip installed into the casing, and the digital display screen, was a marvelous invention of precise design. Primarily, that little gadget housed more than a hundred Scan spells, which back in the day had been his signature spell of use.

Scanning the trees and foliage first with his eyes, he pushed his goggles up over his head and searched for the source. Rain was drizzling down over the highway and frizzing up his tightly knotted hair, but that wasn't really all that important. He had never been able to keep it straight no matter how many different products he tried using. His hair was just that thick. Best he could manage was to pull it back tight against his head and hope to God it didn't frizz too badly. His prayers were hardly ever answered on that matter, but never mind that.

SOURCE OF OLFACTORY SENSORY INPUT DATA 30 YARDS WEST, reported the LCD screen of the scwatch. So, Martin walked that way. All the while he griped and groaned about the ever increasing stench he was heedlessly walking toward. The closer he got, the more weird things started happening to his little wrist worn miracle computer.

Martin Gilcrest

Date: 2009-08-15 03:49 EST
ERROR! Scwatch flashed at him only ten yards in. The LCD screen fritzed up with a staticy overcast, and Martin frowned at the device dismally.

"Stupid thing," he grumbled, tapping his finger hard on the plastic casing. Tap! Tap, tap, tap! "What's wrong with you? Work!" Not once did he allow this minor malfunction to put a stop to the forward motion of his feet, and at about that moment he walked right into a tree. "Umf!"

Martin fell directly on his butt into a squishy puddle of actual mud. It wasn't your average watery mud puddle. Oh no. It had to be a mud pit that had been waiting just for him to drop into. "Ewww! Well isn't that just fantastic," he complained.

Marty, said a voice in the back of his head. This particular voice sounded a lot like it belonged to the horrible love child spawned when you mated Tim Curry, as playing the devil from that movie that Tom Cruise was also in when he was really young, and that guy from Masterpiece Theatre. In fact, one could definitely imagine him sitting in that chair, wearing that robe, reading from that book, except you had to add in the extra bonus that he was big and black and demonic.

Hearing that voice, as always, nearly made Martin jump right out of his skin and land right back in that squishy mud pile. "Y-y-yes, Big D' God, I wish you w-wouldn't do that. Wh-what d-d-do— What is it?" He was twisting and rolling and struggling to haul his butt up out of the mud and get back on his feet.

I don't think you should go in there, remarked the GF conversationally. He almost sounded completely casual when he spoke, but this time Martin thought for sure he detected a note of trepidation. Was that fear" Actual, honest to goodness, fright, in the demon's tone"

The scwatch's LCD screen was still fritzing, staticy and flashing ERROR! at him beligerently. Martin frowned most irritably at the device and smacked it a couple of times.

"What're you going on about, Big D?" he sighed, giving up on getting a reading from the blasted accessory. He looked up to try to catch the sun, gauge his position the old fashioned way. That horrible reeking stench curled up under his nose from the right and he made a face. "Eeeugh. That way," he realized, and stepped around the tree.

Well, it's just that I'm getting a really bad feeling, confessed the GF, sounding much more ill at ease the closer Martin got to the suorce of the smell.

"You" A bad feeling?" Martin found that a little hard to swallow.

TK's feeling it too.

Well, that gave him pause. Martin stopped, holding a wrist up under his nose, and gave the whole notion of investigating a moment of reconsideration. At that moment, the scwatch deemed it appropriate to fizzle and explode. "Oh, come on," Martin lamented. "You've got to be kidding me! I put so much work into this thing! What the heck could've made it go and do that?"

Scowling at a particularly ominous looking patch of muscadine bushes, he mustered nerve he never had before and trudged onward. Whatever was in there really, really stank. And to top it all off he was pretty sure that it was responsible for breaking his scwatch!