Double or Nothing: One in a Million

Ghosts Can't Be Possessed, Dummy

Eleanor raced down the hallway, locking every door behind her as quickly and quietly as her mechanical fingertips could manage. Sweeping across the living room at a record pace, the paranormal machine leapt high toward the stepladder leading up to the top of the kitchen countertop. Wheels on the bottom of her feet retracted, allowing Eleanor to run as fast as her mech suit would permit. She slid on her hands and knees across the counter, leaping over the container bearing the slowly healing Sin Hunter in a tank of bubbles.

Eleanor began typing on the keys of the holographic board when loud footsteps caused every limb in her body to freeze. Her screen face tilted to the hallway just outside the kitchen area. Though specters are void of internal organs, Eleanor could feel every inch of her ghostly form shivering against the wires and tubes of her mechanical suit. "Oh, crap," she whispered. The shadow of a large, cloaked nightmare filled the door at the entrance to the kitchen. Its shadow covered the room in a dark, ominous silence.

Eleanor redirected her attention to the keyboard as hammering shook the walls. 'I can't get Jack out of here now, but maybe I can keep him safe until I need him again!' She thought, pressing a button beneath the counter. The glass case concealing the Sin Hunter from the room descended into the table as the lock in the towering steel door began to click open. With little time left, Eleanor leapt down beneath the table, throwing herself against an inner compartment while she prayed Jack would slide out of sight fast enough.

As soon as Eleanor had thrown herself against the row of files and digital compartments, the door into the kitchen was thrown open. For many minutes, Eleanor withdrew from her mechanical suit, powering off while her spectral apparition allowed her to glide around in silence. Powerful footsteps shook the space above the table, while wings carried another being to the top of the table above the shaking specter. Eleanor drifted her broken glasses toward the edge of the table, breathing slowly and carefully.

'Crap! They can both see me with those lenses I gave them! Oh, Eleanor, you poor, undead idiot!' The specter slapped herself with her hands drifting carelessly through one another. Eleanor paused, watching her hands fade in and out of vision. 'Well, great. Can't even hurt myself for my stupidity.' The ghost turned her sight toward the shadows above the table. Loud beeping and key clicking filled the air above the table space. Stuffed behind rows of plates and dishes beneath the table, Eleanor weaved through the maze of dish ware, fixing her gaze on the cephalopod in front of the table.

Morpheus wasn't himself, from what Eleanor had managed to draw. His black coated titanium armor was outlined in a deep green light, and even his cloak, once a royal blue and gold, was now a harsh and consuming black with several heads of what looked like a hydra spewing their forked tongues at the corners of his cloak in emerald green scales. Eleanor dashed out of the corner of the table compartment, flinging herself upward toward Morpheus' averted gaze. Squeezing her eyes, Eleanor leapt through the titanium black frame of Morpheus' breathing mask, plunging into a strange new world.

Here, in the subconscious, Eleanor found herself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of books, texts and manuscripts floating through shelves and wires stretching across the ancient labyrinth of history. The mind of the greatest intelligence in Sloth was everything Eleanor had anticipated: orderly, tidied and strangely dusty. However, there was a stagnate, unsettling sense of isolation. The books weren't moving from their shelves, information wasn't being transferred from cortex to cortex, it was as if this emerald curse had frozen everything solid.

Eleanor found her footing as a mirage of her living, fleshy self, running through the hallways until she reached the center of the Technological Tyrant's mind. Here, suspended by powerful green chains, Morpheus in his shockingly small, clammy form, hung limp and near lifeless in the center of the room. Standing on a floating platform a few feet away, however, was a robed, ancient deity Eleanor had never seen. It was carefully monitoring something from a white window gazing out at the world.

This creature was large and powerful, about the height of Morpheus with his power suit. Deep, mud colored robes draped across bubbling green scales, while frills carved from bones and skulls hung like jewelry around its neck and robes, adorning the cuffs and sleeves of its coiled, tentacled fingertips. Sharp teeth like an anglerfish jutted from its slicked back smile, and a pair of ancient, blank eyes, glossy and clear of emotion, observed the lights from the window. Eleanor took a step back, but before she cold run back to reality, the deity spoke in a grinding, gnashing rasp.

"Foolish little Demon. Should nothing be denied my intellect, purely on the bias of my lifeless eyes?" Eleanor froze, her fingers latched onto the railing as the unsettlingly spiky deity turned, its eyes resting on the specter. Four sets of eyes, above and around the largest pupils, snapped open while tendrils coiled around its eyelids, forming rough creases and unsettling, clammy veins. "And yet...you deny me your psyche. My magic is strong, for I am Leviathan, the Titan of Hell's crushing currents!" The Demon froze, its fist clenched before the glowing white window in the void.

"However," Leviathan continued, lowering its sleeve behind its back, "your spectral form allows you to deny my hypnosis. I am appalled by your resilience." Eleanor fixed her glasses, their lenses fractured in the emerald library's light. Her last gaze lingered on the tattered, beaten image of Morpheus, shackled to chains binding the Lord of Sloth to his own mind. "Forget it!" Eleanor shouted, averting her gaze to the robed and frilled Leviathan, whose smile sliced at her ghostly heart strings. "I'll kick you out of here, just you wait!"

But as Eleanor dashed away, vanishing into the shelves of expansive knowledge, Leviathan's watery pupils narrowed, and his sickly, misshapen smile soured. The sharpened bone frills lining his neck and coat of watery robes trembled when he spoke, directing his large, numerous pupils to the blinding window in the void. "This...apparition. She concerns me greatly, to a level I have not felt in millennia." Leviathan directed its attention to the wrinkled, clammy form of Morpheus, his tentacled beard curling into weary, half conscious tendrils.

Leviathan's eyes retreated from the Technological Tyrant, crossing his webbed claws behind his robes. "My parasites, my precious seeds of corruption...they control all. They are my will, my testament of Sloth. And yet...yet I cannot have disruptions clouding my objective." Leviathan directed his attention to Morpheus, his grotesque smile protruding from his sickly lips. "It was fortunate that I was summoned from the grave to command Sloth once again. But this place is strange, alien to me." Leviathan moved themself through the void toward the chains that shackled Morpheus, his bulbous eyes narrowing.

"I have lie slain in the compressed abyss of Hell's oceans for hundreds of thousands of years. I will not be denied my freedom from those savage lands now, when my essence has been summoned of use once more. For only in eternity does chaos reign supreme."