Tale of Woe at the Mart of K, A True Story of Eldritch Horror and Vile Transformations Options

[Autobus Prime]

Gather round, if you dare, and hear this tale of Woe and Disgust.


It was the black and dreary eve of a sour gray day heavy with portents and fearful omens.
The chill winds of evening swept and howled through the eyeless hulks of factories,
and scattered leaves through the bleak desolation of shattered marketplaces,
that seemed to echo with the undying moans of the giants who labored long at their construction.


From my rattling carriage I did descend, wrapping my face tight
so as to exclude the foul vapors and manifold plagues borne upon that deadly wind.


I should have turned back.
Had I not observed the foreboding flights of the screaming crows?
Did I not hear the rising madness in the baying of the distant hounds?
But I did not, for I was in the grip of a deadly compulsion...the irresistable urge of a collector.


Someone had seen one there. It was a Transformer. It was...


...but that is nothing to our story.
And were I to tell, the others may find out, and what of our chances then?


So it goes in the twisted mind of a collector.


I looked up, blinking, in the pestilent wind, and there it was.
A massive and monolithic edifice of horror, a vast bulk of dreadful size,
adorned with a great and cyclopean letter K...casting its blood-red luminescence to the night.


The mart of K.


And of chaos.

Never a place did I know more saturated with the purest essence of ultimate entropy,
where the shelf stock was piled hither and yon in wild Bacchanalian abandon,
where the price tags expressed not the harmony of universal orderability,
but a wildly dissonant cacophony,
where the checkout lanes moved no swifter than the glaciers of the ninth circle of Hell-


...but I digress. I chose my refuge from the diseased evening, and dove through the gaping door.


And immediately my senses were assailed by a foul stench.
Not the sulfurous stench of the outdoors this, no, but fainter...

yet closer...

and more recognizable...


I looked down and saw it.


Human waste.


A large lump, softball-sized, upon the floor.

Looking further, I saw another, smaller lump, bearing the unmistakable marks of footwear.
And another...and another...in a trail without visible end.


Not my shoe prints. I was happy about that.


But this joy died quickly...do they not always?

They were coming...a teeming throng of shoppers...
a surging mass of humanity...oblivious to that which lay at their feet.


"Stop!" I cried, gesticulating wildly at the floor.
"Do you not see it! Be wary lest you spread the pollution far afield!"


Slowly, cautiously, they turned to look...slowly, grudgingly, they turned aside...
...for does the deep-buried mind not welcome destruction, and is it not a thing of vast and wearing effort to turn from this inescapable slide?


Still, the trudging multitude parted, and streamed around the grotesque pile. But what to do? I could not stand my ground forever.


I had Transformers to buy, remember.


Also, it was gross.


Therefore I commandeered a nearby communication station.

"Excuse me," I declared, bold and stentorian,
"but could someone come to the health & beauty department? There's a mess on the floor."


Long I waited ere I saw him approach...a servant of that realm of chaos, bearing its strange livery.
A badge he wore, scored with letters and the heraldric bars of light-beam scanning.

I wondered if it were simply his name, or if it partook in the universal disorder of that place.

If presented, what horrible aberration would it reveal in place of his true name?
Would it mark him as a seven-legged horror from Paramus VI, or twelve stones' weight of expired Slim Jims?


I dared not inquire.


A single paper towel he held in his bare hands, the slimmest membrane to exclude the filth.
A bottle he held crowned with an atomizing jet.
It appeared to be deodorizer.


Reaching down, he scooped up the obscene thing in that frail paper film,
spraying lightly where it had been, to obliterate the stench, before wiping again.

He nodded at me, with a word of thanks, as I stood transfixed with shock, and I recovered briefly to reply in kind.


And then I read his badge.


"Pharmacy".


I fled in terror from that place, bursting through the yawning doorway, gulping down lungfuls of poisonous air.
I stumbled to my carriage, lashing its four rust-colored horses into foaming insanity,
and dashed for the safety of my tower as the sickly rains poured down.


A week later, I went back and bought PCC Icepick.


Gosh, I hope that guy washed his hands.

[Vestras]

LMAO, That was amazingly disturbing

Cheers mate!

[newsy891]

I'm suddenly imagining you narrating your life in a movie-trailer voice, and wishing everyone else would do the same once in a while.

"How was work today, honey?"

"In a world where servers are reduced to useless tangles of wire... only one man can save the accounting department from the reign of chaos and destruction."

[Pony of Merak]

loved it!

but, who would have the guts to deposit what-should-be-on-the-toilet there?

[Freddycon]

this was genuinely disturbing and awesome at the same time!