Happy Ending's Moving Picture Show, our Hallow

The Porn Theater

Starshine's in the projection room cutting clips of nightmares from his time at the Briar Patch into 'The Lake House' starring Keanu and a seven headed snail. Between reel swaps, he drills rivets into his jawline.

Pinky's locked in a room with a steel door. It reads 'Employees Only'. Sometimes struggling can be heard, and wrenching at fettered chains. The occasional smashing against a brick wall is distant in the belly of the building. Giggling mad and grunts of a foul appetite.

Twinkle at the concessions stand, contemplating buckets of writhing popped corn and explaining to the voices in her head the importance adding of salt, and whether or not people jack off while thinking of anyone they're related to. She struggles with the theory of money exchange, and smashes her delicate hand through a glass plate. After, she examines the shards lodged in her skin curiously.

In the bathroom, Clover is a bad janitor. You might catch him shooting the last of someone life force into his arm in a stall to sate his hunger. A few extra duckets will help trade with his precious Goblin Fruit dealer. He leaves a marking on the wall, a smeared painting of a gnarled tree on the bathroom tiles in semen, excrement and blood. He'll have an apple or two, but not much cleaning actually gets done.

Starshine's Mask

Pinky

Twinkle's Mask

Twinkle

Pinky's Mask

The Straw Men's History

The Straw Men formed across parts Austria. A gathering of ex-cons from the Briar Patch cobbled together out of a common terror. Each honed their own role within the motley to a notable craft. Star-shine kept them together. His authority earned in the bloody uprising that led to most of their escape.

Indeed, this group needs each other. Without a collective, the motley’s members would soon spin off to their mortal fates. The wild Pinky, a monster with no restraints runs a bloody and gory muck. Clover would die off second, succumbing to his addictions unchecked. Twinkle, not far behind without teachers to guide her through the intricacies of modern humanity. Eaten by the streets most likely. And what a sad and lonely survivor Star-shine would make, a general with no troops. Furthermore, they have a symbiotic relationship. Twinkle peddles odd fruits and apples to sate Clover’s vices, and Pinky is fed by the leftovers from Clover’s habit. Twinkle relies on these skewed teachers for the vaguest understanding of the real world, more alien than Arcadia to earth. And Stare-shine uses them all, it’s his support group. This gathering of surreal entities are like just him, monsters, miscreants, or misled, these are his people, ex-cons.

The Straw Men’s early history is marred by several criminal blunders, and consequent disappearances of a score of Austrian private citizens. They were testing their legs, testing the market, seeing how below the radar they could operate without getting major attention from the Court. After a working relationship was established, they had more successes. But their attachment to the ideals of the Autumn Court grew more intense, salting their goals with new a found philosophical bent. The Straw Men came to realize their escape had a meaning, one they were wasting on selfish ideals like greed and survival. No. There was purpose here, the withering autumn months called them back to Austrian soil to do its bidding.

The Straw Men spread their vice, enable it in others, and aid those that choose a withering path. Aid them not to get caught. Their words, ‘Never Shackled Again’. It is their anointed role to enforce the gravity of the last harvest season. They see themselves as proprietors of fear, co-enablers of vice, and crushers of those with hope enough to challenge their ways. The subtle creeping of impending rot, they work low-key, now a perfected art.

It wasn’t till a year or two later they heard of another motley calling themselves the Straw Men, claiming similar connections to the Briar Patch. They ran about Germany, rumor was most of them got shot up in a confrontation with the police, but none could confirm this. The other supposed Straw Men cell was run by a man named Jacob One Two, something with a mechanical heart. The two cells never met each other, and none of the Austrian Straw Men have actual proof other escapees from the Briar Patch made it past the Hedge, or Clover’s Orchards for that matter. But it was a message passed on from someone claiming to be of the Straw Men that led Starshine and the Motley to Vienna.

“The Warden has spies in Austria’s heart.”

That was enough. Real or not, the Straw Men would find out. They’d dig them from the shadows and grind their bones to make bread. Personal vendetta is a great motivator, and so it was that the Straw Men came to Vienna.

Their arrival was timely, they'd missed the massacre at the infamous 'Event of Joy" by a year, though it was odd to see Vienna so sparse of Changelings. The Straw-Men's commitment to the Autumn Court was also to their favor, as Autumn seemed the dominant season amongst the seasons. They quickly fell into the political system, Starshine being the figure head for the alien ex-cons. He attacked politics as a mechanical problem. Did quite well to, using the size of this Motley to bolster Autumn's hold, under Der Schwarze Vogelscheuch's ruler ship. For this, they were awarded tittles of position. Fear Wardens, the lot of 'm. And the Straw Men had an excuse to dig in now and root for the Wardens spies. Be them in Court, or creeping about the Hedge.

Though during the Straw Men's stay in Vienna since, they've yet to turn over a nest of informers or the Warden's minions. But there's time yet to search, and occasionally the Motley turns its suspicions inwards for a possible double agent amongst their own ranks. A bit of paranoia keeps them on their toes.

They've taken up residence in a local abandoned Porn Theater, where their Hollow exists. It's from this central location that the Straw Men operate. Booby-trapped beyond mortal comprehension, the entire place is a maze waiting for intruders to make the wrong step. Starshine's seen to this. Clover's also infiltrated the seedy underbelly of Vienna's streets, grifting tar to mix in his apple injections and pegging the big dealers in town at the same town. Pinky currently works at a meat packing plant, the cannibal is the bread winner of the bunch. While Twinkle still struggles to carve a nitch for herself into the human world. A place that's just as alien to her, as she is to it. Twinkle demands constant supervision, and can be seen being led through Vienna by any of the Straw Men. Well, maybe not Pinky.

Clover pict

C

The How and Why of Twinkle Baby

"Teach me to grow like you do, Lacklustre."
The gourd lay smashed on the ground, the insides splashed out across the floor like a bloodstain. Lacklustre held a paintbrush in his tendril. A Christmas tree glistened wetly on the wall, like the tears on her blank white mask.
"You can never grow. You can only change."
Lacklustre's laccata oozed perfume like tobacco. His forehead still bled from the thorns. He thought he was a martyr.

"Teach me to fly like you do, Pigleine."
Pigleine cried a lot. This, she thought, was why she wore the sunglasses and cut her hair short. They said that Pigleine had sold her hair to be allowed to fly for one hour, once a day, at sunset. The fence was tall and white, it had been painted (but not by Lacklustre), and there was a tower or a statue of a steel skeleton through Pigleine's window. Pigleine was fat. Or, at least, moreso than Twinkle Baby, who ran up and down the stairs trying to hide day in and day out.
"You can never fly. Your wings are black."
Pigleine used to be a princess, or at least that is what she told everyone. An Eye-Tell-Young princess. But Pigleine was just a pig.

"Teach me to hate like you do, Omaha."
Omaha (whose real name was Otahu) always had two things that reminded Twinkle Baby of home. Somewhere, somehow, he always had a cigarette. The cigarette was often taken, but he always managed to find another. He never told where he found them, even when he was tortured for days on end. Twinkle Baby liked to listen to him scream. He had a pretty voice. If she could reach between the bars, she might have been his girlfriend. Omaha also had a baseball bat. Omaha, however, did not play baseball. He liked to live by himself, and when the Warden put someone else in his cell...Lacklustre liked to paint with the gourd-insides.
"You can never hate, unless you learn to love."
Omaha was a lot smarter than he looked.
"Teach me to love like you do, Omaha."
And Twinkle Baby learned.

The mask never comes off, and Twinkle Baby never plays baseball, never flies, and never grows. But she always changes (even her black wings change color), she knows how to fall and she knows how to love and she knows how to hate. She even understands why one does not come without the other, like white without black. Like falling and jumping (because she cannot fly, her wings are black).

Star Shine -- Introduction.

Sometimes, words fail you.

Love is only a four-letter word, with no meaning that translates from one person to another; it is a bond between two, and sometimes more, people, expressing a range of sensation from jealousy and loss to victory and union, and everything in between.

Pain is only a four-letter word; to someone with a limb being sawed off by a twisted prison warden, it is absolutely meaningless, lacking the credibility of a decent scream of cerebral terror and shock.

Star Shine, when he had a human name, could have told you that.

They say, "Time heals all wounds"

Star Shine adds: "Yeah, when its not inflicting even more."

His story, as all stories, starts with a drum beat.

Let's rock.
----------------
Eli Morris, born in nineteen-hundred-sixty-five, vanished from normal life when his father walked into a drug store to buy a box of condoms and two packs of Marlboro's, in 1980. Since then, its been nothing but fun for his entire family. His father, Walter Morris, was a witness to the Mafioso-wunderkind Tony "Gillette" Lascerta of Sicily getting his prescription filled. The prescription was for a bottle of over-the-counter speed-analog, marketed as a diet pill. While getting it filled, he inadvertently bumped into Wyatt Lewiston of Ft. Worth, Texas, recently parole-violated for robbing a drug store, the Walgreen's he was visiting being his fourth in as many days. The resulting gunfire sent Wyatt Lewiston to the morgue, and Tony Lascerta to jail, where he, in a moment of panic and confusion, admitted to dealing narcotics.

His resulting trial hinged upon the testimony of Walter Morris witnessing the execution-like murder of the erstwhile robber, Wyatt Lewston. The jury found the first four shots acceptable responses to someone's life endangered by a drug-crazed gunman; the two shots which went 'up' Wyatt's still-living body, however, were seen as 'excessive'. He received a life sentence, and issued a death sentence of his own against the man and family which supported that man, who helped put him away for eternity. The edict was called 'vengeance', but it was simply business as usual. The difference became clear, later.

Walter Morris was a walking corpse from then on; every move he made, he had six men with guns on him at all times. At first, uniformed officers, then Federal Agents. then at the end, four hitmen and two gangsters hired to get rid of his corpse with a fleet of garbage bags and cinder blocks at the end of the docks. This ends the saga of Walter Morris.

Left without a family, Eli Morris was castaway in the ocean of life. Foster homes. Group homes. Mental homes. Juvenile facilities. Correction facilities. Eventually, a prison sentence, for arson. All in the span of eight years. Life can sucker punch you so hard, your spirit never draws another breath. His seemed to die of asphyxiation, until he found a place in the chemistry lab at a community college.

At this point, life is over as he knew it as a human.

One night, while online, a blackjack blow to the skull rendered him unconscious; the subsequent trip through the Hedge, into the Briar Patch, handled the rest. He did not sleep the first night; he spent it in tears, getting acquainted with his keeper and newly-assigned task: chained to an anvil and forced to drag it about as he went through his routine, he would be the smith of the instruments of delight and wonder, of terror and agony, some of which would be used on his body, mind, soul, and anything else which the jailer, Steelsmile, could touch, which was more than enough for anything sentient to find comforting.

For the next seventeen years, he endured agony, bliss and heartache, feeling the pulse of the world ebbing away from him with each tortured breath of his iron-dusted lungs; with every pound of his tortured frame, he felt that much more disconnected from his birth-world, anchored in every way that could matter to the world which was his hellish prison, his blessed lair of unearthly delights. This was the second-worst thing he ever saw in his entire life. Words couldn't describe the brutal sensations, the fierce love he was compelled to feel for his fellow captives, for their suffering, for their eventual deaths and deprivations he grew addicted. He knew what they called him: warder, kapo, sellout, snitch, Steelsmile's bitch, or worse: the affectionate nickname he gave his favored "creation" with the filed metal teeth like the sparkling lights in the night skies -- Star Shine. He was all that, and worse; he signed up for it, thinking it would lessen the blows, rescind the horrors, take back the terrifying vista of his world into something only partially insane, or tolerably Hellish. He was wrong, and would be proven so with every falling night.

In somewhere in 1985, the warden of the Briar Patch introduced a new prisoner, recently arrived from inside the Hedge; someone who'd made his own Devil's deal with the Hobgoblins, the Others, the perpetually Lost: his name was Jeeter, and he was also an Artificer, a Smith who was all-too-willing to teach. He didn't teach the trades; he exchanged knowledge. For every bit of trivia of the 'real world', he would give up a piece of knowledge he'd accrued in one sort of world or another: a Contract made easier, a Clause made more amenable to all parties, the way the Escaped Ones made their ways through the Trods, into the World of Births. He also taught something else he knew: survival through the spectacle of fearsome deeds.

"It is not the size of the dog in the fight," he had tattooed across his back, "but the size of the fight in the dog."

He instructed Eli Morris in prisoncraft; how to build a shiv from nothing, almost literally. He learned about baseball teams.
Together, they suffered tortures, selling each other out a dozen dozen times over and back, begging for death.
Time healed their wounds, sealing their rifts again, forgiveness their bridge between them.

He instructed Eli Morris about the world between Faerie and the Real; he was told about national politics.
United, they endured elegant dreams crafted from their own fantasies, turned into cartoonish hate-filled venom of spirit and smoke, used to entertain the often-horrific guests of Steelsmile.
The passage of nights became their bandage, layering the wounds closed through pressure and privation.

He instructed Eli Morris about Contracts and Clauses; he in turn, learned about the return of Vietnam veterans.
They were forced to kill one of their own, in mercy, to keep his tortured death from infecting the others with the viral dreamstuff that Steelsmile gave to the prisoners if he had to go on leave for a season or two, to allow them to torture themselves in his absence.
The cold stares of the other prisoners turned into something less dark, more human; they weren't hated because of what they were, just who they were. No longer would they be hated for their compliance in building the monstrosities for the jailor, but because they were still basically assholes in their own right.

Then Steelsmile returned, bearing ill tidings: a cleansweep, starting with Jeeter. Jeeter was strung up and his skin made into a windsock, lashed to Eli's spinal column as a pennant, flapping and moaning in the breeze for eternity. It retained sentience, and a damned dark one at that.

This time, it was Steelsmile's turn to be the instructor: He instructed Eli Morris in how to make Steelsmile regret ever capturing anyone who met Eli Morris from that day forward.

"I am now a biological weapon," Eli-the-Dead said to Eli-the-Living, ".. and I want to share my disease." Inking himself with a mighty Contract of warfare, of hate, of terror and pain, of strength and will, he gave himself a new image: if he must be a star and shine, behold the power of the black hole -- a star shining inwards.

That night, when the cells were being prepared for their 'cleansing', Eli lead the other Smiths into the galley; the cooks, long since members of the Artificers, understood: when a Smith takes your knife, it is either dull, or just about to enter your skull; resist, and it might cost you your life. No one resisted. Armed, they entered the pantry; the food stocks were raided, the animal pens were next: grabbing the hunting dogs used to track down the nigh-endless multitude of escapees of the Briar Patch. Steelsmile's tower, the tallest by far, in the middle of the compound, was surrounded by the other jailers.

A quiet pact made the circuit of the camp: from this day forward, no more chains and whips, no more bruised souls and ruptured dreams -- from this day forward...

"No prisoners!"

The first assault was a rush, and that rush was intense; it died almost instantaneously, ineffective as anything imagined by mere humans could ever hope to be. Skulls and hearts were filled with blistering heat and wondrous majesty alike, sometimes simultaneously: one survivor of the first rush was a man bearing a pennant in one hand and a salt shaker in the other. With a shriek of the battlecry, he leaped at Steelsmile, slamming his head against his keeper's over and over again, the iron-shod coin long-since wedged in by an errant scullery maid, his only true weapon. Every punch landed, Eli ensured made impact with his face. He bit, his teeth long and sharpened from filing and filling in with waxed iron filings from a thousand rusted buttons and lost keyrings. He fists became a projectile system for his anvil; he used it to dodge by simply throwing it across the room, forced to fly after it as shot after shot of Steelsmile fell short of the mark by inches, then feet, then by entire directions. When the time came, he looked down upon his captor, and saw the eyes which entranced him, which imprisoned him, which filled him with hateful love and wondrous power.

And he stomped them right out of the fucker's skull with an anvil in each hand.

"No prisoners."

The march through the Briar Patch was not one in silent desperation; this was Sherman's March to the sea. This was no Bataan Death march; this was a military campaign, enacted to terrify the occupants into fleeing, battening down the hatches if they couldn't. Two of the Faerie's residents made an approach, but Steelsmile's mark was one which ensured that prisoners, even if inches from the edge of the Hedge, were still in his power. Assuming them to be simply a game gone further than most, the two wandered back, unconcerned about the entire affair, considering it trifling and hardly worth notice.

"No prisoners."

Two more dull-witted Fae joined the firebrand piles; the wagons loaded with torches, burning a superhighway's width of passage through. The lumbering bulks in the shadows were cast back by the audacity, the tenacity, the sheer stupid madness of a group of escaped prisoners with the balls to march out, growing in the strength of the barbs tearing at their feet, the Brambles becoming the smoke they rasped through accordioned lungs and bent windpipes.

Arrival at the edge of the Hedge came apparent when the flames went out, iced solid and the war-cry of their own devising became a shrieking chant behind them: mercenaried souls, chained to the will of a True Fae, chasing them down for sport, for bounty, for the sheer bloodymindedness of it all.

Then the chase was on, in earnest.

They ran through the bushes, they ran through the Brambles, they ran through the places where the Hobgoblins wouldn't go. They ran so far, so fast, they burst out the other side in a tangle of limbs, confused.. terrified and utterly lost in a new world.

Since then, it's been a numbing, bumpy ride.

And, notably, still no prisoners.

The Warden

The Wants of Clover

The Briar Patch is taller than it is wide, and digs deep beneath the soil as well. Its multiple towers reach into the sky as broken fingers, rising and falling while the days pass. Cells will build and crumble, shifting to maintain a level of slight, vague, unending discomfort for those within. Its walls are gray stone, veined with the blue and red like a living entity. The roofs are wicked spikes, and its subterranean chambers crawl underfoot in a tangled web of roots. The gates of the cells inside are barbed by the stingers of strange ants and its never warm. What you sleep on was once a miserable beast, thin and underfed, now just rotting skins. What you eat is inedible, a lumpy, unidentifiable gruel. Its thrown at you, you have to cup your hands to catch it. The thing in the cell next to you walks about at night, scratching at the walls but never speaking. The Warden is not your friend. This is the penal system of Arcadia, the Briar Patch.

Surrounding the Briar Patch, far as the eye can see, are its orchards. The trees are gnarled and stooped, and shade the daylight with their canopy. They grow the ripest, juiciest apples you would ever want to sample. More red than a prick of blood on the end of your thumb. The trees don’t allow a single piece of fruit to drop, and they never rot. The fog will ebb and flow, and the wind changes degrees from slight to unmanageable. One could hide here, if one were to escape the Briar Patch. But it wouldn’t be advisable to taste the apples.

There’s a man named Joseph Weber from Vienna, and like a few other unfortunate souls, by some strange will he ended up here. He wasn’t worth much to society; in fact you could say he was a financial and emotional vacuum for all his loved ones. Love and money, he’d shoot in his arm. A cute habit he picked up in art school, though it eventually turned Joseph into a pariah. The kind you call ‘junkie’. The kind that forces your father to disown you, and your mother never speak your name again. So this sorry failure of an artist turned his life over to heroin and started a dark spiral downwards in his early twenties.

It was when Joseph found himself in jail, that things got weird. He was busted for a small time purchase; he was always too paranoid to move anything heavy. But he got cuffed and taken to a jail anyways. By the time they got him in lock-down, he was a feverish sweaty mess. They thought about putting him in a medical unit, but when he later calmed down Joseph was allowed to ride it out.

He went cold turkey the next morning, the pains of abuse knotting up his insides. As night came upon him again, he was informed what he was being charged with and when his court date was. The bail was set at a modest amount, though he couldn’t pay it himself. The last human to speak with Joseph before he left for Arcadia was his father. And his words were so filled with disappointment and disgust, it haunted the young man for fourteen years.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, you’re not my son.” *click*

Joseph’s father didn’t bail him out; tomorrow he’d investigate a bail bonds company. Tonight, he looked at the modern cell and jail structure built around him. A sterile, organized home. Even organized in its violence. Stabbings occur in a warded off area on the yard, between 1^st and 2^nd break. Pretty easy to follow. Joseph would not be around to further examine the minutia of the modern penal system, he was bound elsewhere.

He was convulsing on the bed, cramped and uncomfortable, when he spied something by the grating. Not just any something, a needle. He perked. A needle? Shit, is that some tar someone snuck in here? Sliding off his damp sheets he crawled over to the corner to investigate it. Only when he got closer, the needle rolled into the grating. It took him thirty minutes and two fingernails to pry that thing open. And when he stuck his bleeding finger into the vent hole, he fancied he could almost reach that shiny metal prick of the needle’s tip. And then, as if the gods were cursing him, it rolled just out of reach again. To fit his whole body in there was not going to be an easy task, and more than likely he’d get discovered half stuck in the vent-way. If it were human accessible, someone would have escaped through these already. To his complete surprise though, he tried, and successfully peeled the grating back far enough to stick his upper body in the vent. When he still couldn’t reach it, out of a junkie’s desperation, he crawled fully in the shaft.

He was suddenly sliding, as though someone tilted the vent on him. Its surface was slimy with some ooze. And ahead was only dark. Sliding and landing into a stone cell to break his fall. Dimly lit, he could still vaguely make out the needle on the cell floor, tied crudely with rusted wire. It skittered across the uneven stone, tugged by something beyond black, barbed bars. It was a great hunched figure, grinning in the shadows, its folds of molted fat busting out of a gray uniform. Across its leather belt was a huge ring of keys, each key wildly different from the ones in front and behind. Joseph looked back to see the vent he had slid down, he found none.

So began Joseph’s hard time in the Briar Patch. Lured here by his weaknesses, tempted by a Fae jailer, Joseph scrambled his hardest to wiggle into Arcadia. The jailer found that funny. He wore two mouths, and both laughed equally hard at Joseph’s horror. Joseph shrank into a fetal position upon seeing the jailer’s face, screaming questions and rambling on the edge of sanity. Its hard to say when he actually came to some kind of stable mental state, there was no natural light to filter into the cell, and there was no telling night from day. Torturous screams wafted down the halls from other cells, only to be followed by hideous laughter. Across from Joseph, something with tentacles lurked in an unlit cell. It was never fed. The only way to mark time was by the jailer’s appearance. The squat, obese thing that fed the inmates would arrive regularly. One mouth grinned more than the other, but Joseph liked neither of them. He would try and ask it questions more coherently. To Joseph’s surprise, it spoke German well.

“Needy, are we, meh?” One mouth said, snapping together like a trap.

“So needy he decided to join us for a while, meh.” The other mouth said with more inflection.

“Think it’ll last long?” Asked the first mouth, and licked its lips.

“We hope so, meh.” Said the second.

It was an unhelpful exchange, and when Joseph grew more courage, and had the audacity to demand to know where he was, he got a jab in the ribs with a wooden pole for his troubles. This would be indicative of Joseph and the Jailer’s future relations.

Who knows how long a man can survive in a prison full of monsters. How long he mired in his cell is unknowable. His sanity was frail in the first few weeks, soon to be followed by a deteriorating health. It was hard to survive on the gruel. The first time he was taken from his cell, he was a shell of his former self. Bearded, scrawny, weak, atrophied, malnourished. The jailer strapped Joseph to a metal bed with a chain made of knuckle bones. Something in a mask was aiding him. When they clamped Joseph’s head down so that he could only look up, he started to get really frightened.

The Warden was the Keeper of every human soul caught in the Briar Patch, and lord of every Fae contained within. He dressed in a double breasted military jacket with shoulder tassels and large cuffs. He was a short Fae, making his oafish underlings and jailers appear that much larger. An older, balding man with reflective spectacles. Though those features were impossible to see beyond the square steel cage that imprisoned his face. His ears were long and gray, and sprouted out from between bars on either side. He always carried a baton, and was generous in its use.

“I likes you, poppet.” The Warden says to Joseph, grabbing his chin. He smashes a few teeth out with the butt end of his baton. “I likes you. We’ll keeps you, poppet. We’ll keeps you till you rot and grow your ears.” His second smash breaks Joseph’s nose. “And a poppet behaves.” The third smash fractured Joseph’s eye orbital bone. Blood filled his eyes, and he remembered little else from his first visit with the Warden.

Those were few and far between, most that were sent to the Warden never returned to their cells. Some things kicked and clung to the stone to avoid seeing him, but the two mouthed jailer was always stronger. And when he wasn’t, guards of straw and sticks in uniforms would aid. The women faeries were often the most abused by the Warden, plucked from all over Arcadia for various incompressible reasons. Several times they tried to ply their magic seductions through the bars of their cells, arousing Joseph and compelling him to flail at the bars with wanton abandon. To smash with his fists, to bang with his skull, anything to escape and free them. The stingers imbedded in his flesh from the bars kept him bed sick for three visits from jailer. It felt like a month.

One of the few activities the human prisoners were allowed was Pit-Fighting. It was debatable whether or not this was reward or punishment, many matches took mortal toles on their combatants. Though those that won fights sometime earned favors from the jailers. After enough time in the Briar Patch, some minds would break and choose any release. The pits at least offered a final conclusion to the torturous stories of these captives. The prospect of ending his suffering by a violent death in a trench did not entice Joseph, nor did spending an unknown future at the mercy of strange entities.

Time passed and slowly tore at Joseph's humanity. He started forgetting the high he used to crave, the streets he used to the walk, the family he shamed. Instead his mind wandered and because to lose tough with what those of the waking world would call reality. Scrawling intricate paintings on his cell walls out of excrement, blood and gruel upon the stone cells of his wall. He'd make peculiar arrangements of the lost artifacts he collected from prison life. Old socks, letters pleading for rescue, and prison tags of inmates that came to their end in the Briar Patch. All the while, he thought of escape.

He wouldn't need to plan, or scheme, or plot in the end, he need only wait. Joseph got caught up in a prison riot started by Stare-Shine, and made a mass dash from the cold walls of the Briar Patch during the fray. Though the the riot which allowed Joseph's escape had appeared to destroy the Warden, this mighty Fae wasn't that easy to dispose of. Laws of mortality and destruction didn't particularly apply, and though the escape truly ate at his power, it wouldn't be very long before the Warden had reconstituted himself and his stronghold.

After the escape, the fogs of the orchard were unforgiving. Weakened by the event and still malnourished, Joseph lost his way from the handful of Lost he fled with. The first few hours he held out hope he’d find them again. When night came, with stinging rain and sentient winds, Joseph crawled into the hallow of an old tree to seek shelter. He resigned to the fact that he was now lost. And most likely being hunted. He could’ve just stayed and enjoyed the gruel. If he was just a better son, he never would’ve been here to begin with. He was so cold, such a worthless man, disowned and shunned. And cold, sleeping in this hallowed tree. So cold. He thought that if he gave into the cold he’d die a peaceful death. The cold, sensing this, eased up in the middle of the night so that Joseph could wake with the pangs of thirst and hunger. And so he did.

Starving, thirsty, weak, he tried to gain his bearings in the orchards. Then he reached up and plucked an apple from a tree. It was so good. It was a rush, a high, so close to tar, better than tar, and just one bite. It tingled every fiber of his being. It was the junkie’s high, the Dragon, only he’d caught it finally!

Joseph collapsed and writhed in pleasure. He puked up some gruel, too high to care, rolling on the dirt floor. That was good shit.

For some time, Joseph halfheartedly looked for an exit. Then he stopped. The apples, they sustained him. He didn’t have to leave, and the Warden never set his straw men after him.

A complete diet of Faerie apples has noticeable effects. It sped up the mutations Joseph was slowly being subjected to. In a matter of three weeks, Joseph was unrecognizable. He crawled from branch to branch at night, hair matted with mud and wild. His nose was a long hooked thing, and his ears curled and uncurled depending on his mood. He grew tall and lanky, though hunched as well. His skin turned wrinkled and sickly, pulling his face into a distorted grimace. Joseph the human, was now Clover the Scarecrow, and completely detached from sanity. Quite simply; he became addicted to poison apples, a vice to match his own in a life near forgotten.

This is where things are hazy for Clover. He knows he spent some time here, eating and guarding his horde in a primal way. Clover didn’t know it, but the Warden knew what would happened if one gets lost in the orchards, he knew Clover would become its scare-crow. If any of the rest get ideas to escape the Briar Patch, they’ll find themselves in the scare-crow’s fields. Another incentive for the prisoners to remain placid.

He did the Warden’s dirty work, running down escapees at night for fear they’d touch /his/ apples. A long wooden scythe was his tool, and he was dressed in furs, and bits of the original prison uniform he was issued in Vienna. There’s no telling how many escaping souls he hacked down out of addiction derangement, but he’d grown into a powerful Darkling by then and those few human souls who were lucky or clever enough to escape fell into his clutches. The Scare-Crow and the Briar Patch coexisted for a while. Successfully even. But all good things come to an end.

One night Clover sat in a gnarled tree, the juice of countless apples smeared over his jagged smile. He grips his scythe and uncurls his ears. Humans running, he thinks. And sees them. And then is horrified. They’re not escaping, they’re running away with bunches of his apples! He leaps down to cut one of the three in half, leaving him to spill his poison prize on the soil. He was a fat man, slow, and he bled a lot. The next was a child. Clover ran her down with ease, hooking his blade between her shoulders and flipping her overhead. The last one though, an adult male, he had the edge. And he was running as if he knew where he was going. And oh look, he’s got goats legs.

Clover caught up to him, just barely, and received a shiv in the stomach for his efforts. Still, his crazed addiction to those poison apples would not allow him to let a thief get away with this. The Darkling was gripped by a narcotic frenzy, desperate. Then there was falling, and thorns and branches. There was blades and teeth and rage and confusion, and Austria rushed up to greet them.

Clover crawled out of an alley with blood in his mouth, four inches of his lower intestine sliced from his belly, and his apples. He took a bite and summoned the strength to distance himself from the would be thief dieing by a recycling bin. The gray of dusk was creeping over the city, Clover tucked his fruit away and gazed with foreign eyes upon the landscape of his lost home. And then he turned back and sucked the last of the dieing man's soul.

Pinky!!

Once upon a time there was a poor child,

with no father and no mother

And everything was dead

And no one was left in the whole world

Everything was dead

And the child went on search, day and night

And since nobody was left on the earth,

he wanted to go up into the heavens

And the moon was looking at him so friendly

And when he finally got to the moon,

the moon was a piece of rotten wood

And then he went to the sun

And when he got there, the sun was a wilted sunflower

And when he got to the stars, they were little golden flies.

Stuck up there, like the shrike sticks 'em on a blackthorn

And when he wanted to go back, down to earth,

the earth was an overturned piss pot

And he was all alone, and he sat down and he cried

And he is there till this day

All alone:

Okay, there's your story!

Night-night!

It was a small miracle Otto lived until two under his fathers care and another small irony that a capture by the Warden actually improved his chances at life. Deiter complained about his retarded son incessantly to anyone who would listen. He griped how Otto had cost him his wife and any happiness he ever had. Till one night a tall stranger asked him, "Why don't you do something about it instead of just bitching all the time." "What can I do?" Deiter asked ready to plundge back in to self pity, "Well, I know a guy who knows a guy, that could help." the stranger responds. "Yeah right, like someone would just steal my retard son if I asked him to." Deiter says in disbelife, "Actually, yes. That's about the long and the short of it." and so it was that little Otto was delivered in to the Wardens care, by treachery of his own blood.

The Briar Patch has many levels. Levels designed for monsters, others designed to incarcerate humans and even a whole level dedicated to the imprisonment of children. It is affectionately refered to as 'The Nursury' by the Nannies who are the Wardens Jailers there. They are the ones that make sure every bed has bugs, every closet has a boogey man and that things really do go bump in the night. The terror of the mob reigns in the Nursury, there are no individual cells as in other parts of the Briar Patch, but large halls filled with children. There are never enough beds to go around. There are never enough bowls for eating either. But there is always enough punishment to go around for not going to bed or sitting down for supper. Worse, are the children themselves. They quickly form gangs of tiny hoodlums to improve their odds at getting fed and avoiding the Nannies wrath. Otto was terribly ill equiped to deal with these situations. His deformity and diminished intellectual capacity prevented him from competeing at the same level witht he other tiny innmates. Hungry and near death young Otto discovered that which would change his life path forever, a body of another child that had been beaten to death the night before. With hunger driving him he sank his teeth in to the soft bruised flesh of the tiny corpse. Otto soon discovered that dead bodies weren't terribly uncommon in the Nursery, and far easier to obtain than the mealy gruel the Nannies served. Fed on this human sustainence Otto began to grow, his sickly frame began reinforcing itself until his crainium wasn't out of proportion any longer, but set atop a thick body many times bigger than a child 8 years old. This fact couldn't be hidden from the Nannies attention and young Otto was soon shipped off to the Pits.


"Wipe him down with gasoline, till his arms are hard and mean. From now on boys this iron pit's your home. So heave away boys. Heave away." the Pit Boss said in peculiar rhyme. "Cross your heart and hope to die when you hear the children cry. Let marrow bone and cleaver choose while making meat for children shoes." he explained obtusely "Through the alley back from Hell when you hear that steeple bell. You must say goodbye to me." Day after day he fought in the pits, and night after night he ate the remains of the losers, growing bigger and meaner as time rolled on. It's hard to say if the Pit Boss bestowed Otto with anything like favoritism, but he was a commodity and thus treated better the better he did in the pit.

One fine day, nearly indistinguishable form any other in the iron pit as Otto was swinging his cleaver through the thigh of a recently defeated champion for the stew pot one of the smiths burst in to the dungeon shouting someting confusing to Otto's ears but it seemed to excite the other Ogres in the pen. Finally, the angry smith marched up to Otto and demanded, "You coming or not you dumb shit?" to which Otto slowly nodded his head, tucked the cleaver in his belt and plodded along behind this little firebrand. The rebellion continued on in the Briar Patch, Otto lending his particular skills in smashing things real good to the cause, smashing his way through the Hedge in the company of a sketchy crew of Leechfinger junkies, Fairest sociopaths and anrchist Wizends, for lack of any oher reason then they told him what to do and don't call him nasty names often.

Now, free of The Warden and his Pit Bosses Otto sticks close to a few of the other inmates that escaped the Hedge in the underworld of Vienna. He works as a butcher in the slaughterhouses by the docks, putting to use his years of cannibalistic expertise with saws and knives. At least people leave him alone there and he gets to eat all the scraps he wants.

Welcome

This is a creative space for a Changeling Troupe to co-ordinate backgrounds, stories and eventually post logs.