Meat Points: Hold Person

 

Through Gods’ years of having his eyes gouged by blades and his ears burst by explosions and his skins flensed by fire and his tongue smothered by dust Artaud had come to understand that a man did not experience events as they occurred, but as memories extending ever backwards. Even with the gift of Haste it was so. He had once felt in slow motion a pistol ball, energy largely spent on his helmet, auger through skull and sinus cavity and slowly render him imbecilic with a tiny bite taken from his frontal lobe. Even unmediated by sense data there was a perceptible gap between the event occurring and the internal experience of it occurring. The quanta could be asymptotically sliced but no sorcery could reach that final point where where experience and thought and action occurred at the same time.

Or perhaps the damage had interfered with memory formation. Even with the lost gray matter Clerically restored there were gaps.

Death could happen to groups of people, to entire races if they had some useful resource or became inconvenient to the Trade Wardens. But if the Tower of Pain was correct, after punishment the soul of the deceased would be stripped of its memories and sent back into the world. If the Strong Man was correct there was no life after death at all. In either case there could be no recollection of the event and it would be impossible to say, from the perspective of the individual, that it had happened at all.

Artaud understood in that moment that the whole concept of the spell was flawed. There could be no Hold Person because there could be no person to be held. Only a series of images, already stale. Pages that if flipped fast enough created the illusion of movement.

 

The crab-thing scuttled over the prone body of the man. It had no homunculus to argue with the decisions its body had already made. Thought and action were identical for such a being and it thought about the tools held in the slimy vaults of its torso. A triangular blade so thin it was invisible from the short edge, a scalping motion (so like the ones the Adventurers performed on Bugbears and Hobgoblins and the eponymous Hogmen of the Plain). From this one it would take the brain. This one. Yes.

The man surged from his impromptu grave on the floor and smashed the bug. Its head flickered. The light went out and left the man in the dark. The insect flicked the blade forward with one manipulator claw and used the rest to scuttle away. Artaud’s hand closed on the wings and they came away like wet paper. A gout of glowing slime flashed out of the hole. He welcomed the flickering and the colors and the pain in his eyes. They were more a friend to him now than the false light of day.

What remained of the adventurer leaped toward the burning light and seized it. The bug stabbed him. Stupid thing, he thought. His lungs couldn’t deal damage. His heart couldn’t hit it. Then he squeezed. There was a cracking sound. He pulled and there was a squelch.


The shining viscera coated his boots and hands and the walls. He had beaten and stomped and hacked with his bolo until there was no intact part larger than his finger. If there had been any lamp oil he’d have incinerated the whole pool of foul smelling slime.

Then Artaud fumbled a potion off Hipolito’s belt. A scroll from Rakia’s. A wand from Pharnobal. He’d get them back up. Like a fungus there was no death if one part survived to resurrect the whole.