Subject: Vengence Most Foul (Very Long - Save - Read later at leisure) Date: Sat, 31 Oct 1998 05:14:29 -0000 From: "Duke Henry Plantagenet" <_no.spam_@_thank.you_> Newsgroups: alt.tasteless Very Long - Save and read at your leisure. Enjoy! ----------------------------------------------------------- The early morning lingers in the autumn here. Like some headache from drinking cheap wine the night before. Light enough not to make you vomit and find the relief that comes after your body has finished heaving and spewing out the poisons you have inflicted on it but just irritating enough. The air is damp and unpleasant, and hangs on you like a raincoat which was hung up wet some days before in a closed cupboard and wearing it now afflicts the nose with musty smells and age old body odours awoken by it's soaking. A resplendent figure stands in the middle of a courtyard looking down a track fading into the grime covered mist. A fine cloak of red velvet hangs from his shoulders over a gold satin and wool doublet - the very figure of feudal supremacy enshrined. He sneezes and the image is lost to us as he fumbles for a handkerchief and blows loudly into it. "Shit, I feel ghastly..." he mutters to himself and closer now we see the unbrushed hair and blackened, sleepless eyes peering into the pale gloom. A horse drawn cart lumbers into view and we see three well dressed figures in red livery coats. One has the reins of the proud black horses pulling, the other two are sitting casually on the sides. They are smiling, relaxed and pleased with themselves. Occasionally, they kick something in the bottom of the cart. The horses come to a standstill, their nostrils blowing clouds in the still air. One of the figures, now fairly obviously female jumps down and kneels. She is blonde, tough, cheerful and has blood on her hands. Someone else's blood and quite a bit of it. "My Liege! We bring two of them!" "Excellent work, Steward. Bring them out." The second figure on the cart leaps down, a dark haired and jolly female. "Good morrow, my Liege, may I present for your delight... Scott J Nieto quoting 23 lines of a thread which was already lacking in tastelessness and should have gone to email long before with no ObT in sight, only to add a lame one liner of 'are people this dumb?' on top..." "Ah, yes Chancellor, I recall a certain degree of bitching between Aemilia and Lenore Levine this week. Lacking in the ObT somewhat, but a one liner lamer should be made an example of occasionally. Far to many of them recently." The two women drop the back of the cart down and drag out a bound and gagged youth with wild staring eyes, one half closed with a purple lump under it, and a split lip which is oozing blood into the gag. With a casual flip, they send him head first into the dirt. The Steward turns back and reaches into the cart again "And this loser posting his Binary of a perfectly ordinary roadkill onto the group. One Jake, I believe." "Indeed. This *road_warrior*..." The Duke's tone is level but mocking. "I think we can find something for him." The object dragged into view called Jake, is not a pretty sight. He didn't have much to start with. Now with tufts of hair ripped out, one ear is reddened bright and his nose is distorted and dribbling blood at fresh intervals. He is hauled out and let to fall off the back of the cart and is kicked in the stomach on the way down. The third, the slim woman with the short, spiky hair dyed a wild pink, leans down from the cart and extends her hand to The Duke. "My Liege." He clasps her arm as swordsmen do. "Good work, Squire." She nods down at the softly moaning form of Jake in the dust, "Opened his front door with his face on the way out." An impression of a pained look crosses the Duke's face, "Careless, I would have thought he would have learned how to, by now." The Squire spat down on the motionless wreckage in the dust, "The fuckwit hasn't even learnt how to read an FAQ for starters." "Put the horses out and fire up the Henry-Pearman, I have an idea in mind for our brave 'road_warrior'..." "Yes, my Liege." "And Squire ... Why Pink of all damn colours?" She laughs and runs her hand through her hair, "All the little girlies fall for it." The Duke smiles back up "Very well, just leave some for me, won't you. Go on with you. The Pearman will need the water level checking, remember." He turns as a gurgled cry sounds behind him. The Chancellor has prised 'Jakes' mouth open and is stuffing a lump of horse droppings into his mouth, "Try spewing that shit, Loser!" "Hold! We are going to attend to master Nieto here first." "My Liege, I was just going to give him something to ponder while he waited." She slams a length of rag over his mouth, twists his head over and ties it tight. "I see. 'Food for thought' was it? Let's deal with Mr.One Line Loser..." ----------------------------------------------------- Scott Nieto sits miserably in the darkness. He was dragged down a flight of stone steps by his legs and hauled into the seat of a large wooden desk framed in heavy black wrought ironwork. The glare of a bright computer monitor is burning into his eyes, but he cannot turn his head away as it is being tightly held in a vice like restraint. A set of shackles secure his legs back under him and the sharp edge of the seat bits into the underside of his knees. The desk has a battered look about it, and countless dark stains which Scott wishes are not blood, but he does not feel hopeful about it. There is an old metal cased keyboard sitting on the desk. It has a raised sharp edge at the front and someone has stuck upturned drawing pins onto the key tops. Two of the three women who dragged out of his house, beat him up and carried him here, now stand either side behind him. The man they had called 'My Liege' is leaned against the wall, twisting a tissue which he inserts up his nostril and extracts a long slimy strand, waves it experimentally for a few seconds before flicking it into the darkness. He speaks, "Scott, first, this is nothing personal. This is just putting into practise one of the tenements of the alt.tasteless FAQ - 'Post quality. Encourage quality. Discourage crap.' When posting to UseNet as a follow-up, quote but quote sparingly, it only takes mere seconds to remove empty space and sig. files and condense the quote to about 6 lines, just enough to remind people of the context and content you are following up. Quoting a whole article makes tedious reading and responding at the top before the quote is bad form. Making people page down though reams of stuff they have already read makes them angry. And you know what makes them really angry? Lame One Liners. Type out what you wrote..." Scott blurts out "wot? you kiddin man?" staring at the evil looking keyboard in front of him. Surely the maniac wasn't serious?? " Steward, Chancellor, help him out here." They each grab one of his arms and prise out his fingers. Key by key, they push his fingers down onto the drawing pins on the key tops, and with each one, he screams in agony. Each pin punctures his finger and scraps on the bone, one pin is driven up under the fingernail, which splits in two and is prised away from his fingertip. They press his wrists down on the keyboard edge slicing deeply into his flesh and his hands turn into a glowing mass of pain. He cries in agony, and finally they drop his arms again. Though his tears he stares at his tormentors - only smiles of pleasure on their faces - how can people be so monstrous? The Duke looks into his face and speaks slowly, "People read alt.tasteless to be grossed out, to enjoy the sicker joys in life, they want you to disgust them or at least amuse them. Thinking about it, you would be hard put to disgust them. Most of all they want quality postings of tastelessness. What they don't want to read is pathetic meaningless comments. You post to a.t, articles about things which are tasteless. Look at your post before you send it. Ask yourself, is it tasteless?" "If it isn't tasteless - DON'T POST THE FUCKING THING!!!" "I can not understand why people can't grasp this straight forward concept, I must ask the same question as you did - 'Are people this dumb?' - notice I can use a shift key, you should try it some day - and all I can say is yes, they really are that dumb and you have answered your own question by example. People really can be dumb enough to re-quote a whole steaming article just to add one feeble line like that. Was your post tasteless? NO. What you were replying to was losing tastelessness fast. You could have added a gross ObT of really sick immensity and dazzled us all into saying 'This man Scott is Mr.Tasteless 1998!!', or you could have just ignored it and gone onto the next thread. This is not a bloody chat conference, even if it gets that way sometimes." "Undo his head." Scott breathes again, perhaps they will let him go now, and stop hurting him. Then with one single blinding move, the Duke rips up the lid of the desk, grabs his hair and pushes his face - ARRRGHHH - into a ... <<< SLAM >>> The Duke pauses for a moment then raises the heavy desk lid. The unconscious form is face down in dirt and broken pottery shards. "My Liege, why did you leave a cacti in the ClueDesk?" The Duke glanced at his Steward, "I just thought it would be a nice finishing touch and anyway I can't stand the stupid plants. Call it style." The Chancellor smiles, "Or was it, you thought he was a complete prick?" "Perhaps, indeed, perhaps..." Then the three of them climb out into the brightening morning, leaving the silent form of Scott in the depths of the ClueDesk. ----------------------------------------------------- Jake looks up at the approach of them. The spiky haired girl had looped metal straps round his wrists and ankles. These loops were now secured on iron spikes driven into the ground. Further restraints in the form of metal loops round his thighs hold him helpless on the ground. He had tried to get up and escape from here, but she had struck him across the head with a bar, stunning him and leaving a trickle of blood running down from his forehead. The loops are cutting into his flesh and all his dazed mind can think of is the pain and the disgusting taste in his mouth. The Duke looks down at the spread out figure. "Jake, let me just explain why you are here. You posted a picture, incoded in Binary format. alt.tasteless is a non-binary newsgroup. You don't post pictures here. Simple. Pictures go to alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless, they don't go in here." "Don't understand me Jake? The internet is not all run on big, powerful machines with masses of hard disk space. Some parts are run on from small servers which cannot cope with high volume. A flood of binaries can choke a server and crash it. Many people who read a.t depend on these small volume server providers." "If you start posting binaries into a conference, a low volume sysop will pull the plug on a conference. People will lose the very conference they love to read and enjoy. Some of us have to pay for our connection. Some of us have to pay the phone bill at the end of the month. If the feed is slowed down because some twit has posted a load of binary rubbish, I end up paying for your stupidity. You either didn't read the FAQ or you just ignored it. Fuck up here and you suffer." The ground trembles. A metallic rumbling sound, with hisses and spits is getting louder, driven by a rhythmic thumping sound. In to view from round a corner comes a brightly painted Traction Engine blowing clouds of steam from it's stack. Clouds of steam fill the air, and it grinds to a halt a few yards from the group. The Duke pats the bodywork with affection. "Isn't it a beauty, Jake? A Henry-Pearman Traction Engine built at the beginning of the century. Over 40 tons of metal, top speed 20 mph, high capacity boiler, found in a barn near here, it was one of six in it's class. It can pull it's own weight again and has been carefully restored to full working order. And today we are going to play with it. We are going to play _Chase the Bunny_" The traction engine starts up again, Jake realising, now sick with terror that it is rolling straight towards him!! It slows. The Duke calls up, "Take it very slowly, I want this inch by inch. I want you to saviour this." The wheel is heading directly across Jake's legs, over the ankle. "The front wheels are about a foot wide. 12 inches to a foot. Did you know, Jake, that you have got about 100 small bones in each foot? Or do I mean *had*?" The wheel now rests against the ankle, the helpless man is wildly trashing about in the restraints which are cutting into him. The first foot is bent under the wheel, then above the hissing of steam and clanking of pistons, above the ghoulish muffled shrieks, is a distinct cracking sound. The leg is squeezed to an improbable taper under the wheel and blood begins to ooze out under the edge. The leg twists then with a crunch the wheel bites though the bone and the leg breaks free. The body twists in agony, the eyes are staring one second, clenched tight shut the next, tears wrung from them each time. Now the next foot is bending under, wrenching the leg round, once more slipping from view, once more the crunching sound, like a stiff paper sheet being twisted into a ball and as the wheel turns, a sticky mat of flesh, skin and bone comes slowly into view. Blood dribbles from the crushed stumps. Jake is still now. The eyes are half closed, and his consciousness has ebbed away. The Duke waves up to the Squire, "Hard down, turn till you are facing away from him with the way he is lying. Line one of the back wheels up on him - I want a serious roadkill here. I get to see all sorts of wildlife pancakes round here. At least, this will be different. Wait a minute, throw some water over him, I want him to enjoy this next bit too." <<>> Groan. Jake's eyes flicker, close tight, then open wide and staring, at the back of the slowing reversing, steam hissing monster. Just visible over his chest, a huge wheel rolling straight up to him. The last traces of sanity vanish, with eyes rolling, throat gargling and body trashing, the restraining straps shred his flesh, sliced open veins gush blood. The huge rear wheel reverses up onto the leg stumps, squelching through the puddle of crushed fresh meat left by the one at the front, their width taking in the whole body. Deliberately, it grinds the stumps under, one knee splits open, splintered bone tearing through the skin, thrusting pinkish-white into the air, before disappearing. The thighs bulge out, breaking the restraining metal band free, to no avail. The body twists and arches as the pelvic bone snaps apart, and the eyes bulge, a mass of fluid spilling out round them. The stomach begins to disappear under and the body lifts up to meet the wheel surface, the head dangling back and the arms straining against the metal bands which hold them, torn deep red flesh striped away from bone, the posts pull loose and the arms swing inwards in one last grotesque embrace of the iron death, as the chest cavity collapses. Finally, the head, now twisted onto it's side, is ground under the wheel, and only now does the huge machine seem to notice the human ant it has trod underfoot and it lifts slightly, then drops forward as the skull rolls over and explodes spreading blood and brain tissue out to the sides before disappearing from view. The Duke regards the carpet of broken flesh and bone, "That was a bit more entertaining! Good one, Jake. Won't ask him to stand up and take a bow, mind." He appears thoughtful for a moment, then says "I know, drop Scott down the Obliette, then we can shovel this mess into a bin bag and drop it down for him. That will finally get rid of both our problems. But first," He turns to his assembled Household, "a bottle of Mead each and a toast to a better UseNet!" "Cheers to you all!" The End ------------------------------------------------------------ I had a ranging temperature yesterday and slept though a fever, I actually dreamt all these. *That* is a sick imagination. The third section looked a lot more graphic than I wrote it. I am not a man of letters or prose. Just have to use your sick imagination... Thanks for reading it.