'Thing'

Extract from the Haydreleine Affair

Apparently Rahah Okeishu's animated retelling, possibly at a pub or other drunken venue, of an incident some years past:

So, I'm whiling away at the entrance to the crypt supposedly 'standing guard' for Celiea but mostly just being lazy... I'm doing my own thing, minding my own business going through some old lab notes and generally being a lump when out of nowhere comes this massive Thing.
I can feel it coming before I see it and then I can smell it and let me tell you, it smells terrible. Like, worse than... well, it's bad. So by the time I see it, I'm about ready for anything, but it's this Thing! It's huge and lumpy and moving in all the wrong places and coming toward me and the logical thing to do would be to run or something, right? Mind, I've also forgotten about Celiea in the crypt by this point - though she can take care of herself, so I suppose it doesn't really matter anyway... so I'm just focussed on this Thing and it's moving towards me... I reach out and concentrate on its feel.

It's cold.
Colder than cold, really. It feels cold like the void between galaxies, but this Thing of coldness is no void and it's still coming toward me but now I'm ignoring the Thing completely and focussing only on the coldness.

It's really cold. Now, being the deresi that I am, I of course try to lower my own temperature even more so as to take whatever warmth it has beneath all that cold, but the thing is, I can't. It doesn't have any. All it is is cold, and then suddenly the Thing takes a swipe at me, near lops my head off with one of its wobbly, smelly arms... and I remember, oh, right. Thing. I'd forgotten about it at the cold.
So there's this Thing and it's attacking me, you know? Taking big meaty and horribly smelly swings - they're easy enough to dodge, but the Thing is huge and fast and strong, so if I, oh, I don't know, miss a dodge... eh, it'd suck.
No, of course, at this point, you would think it would finally occur to me to run. Attacked by a Thing, probably going to get killed. But no, there's this Thing attacking me; why would I run? I have a gun! So I figure I can just shoot the Thing and it'll be all be peachy. Of course it doesn't occur to me that at such a range shooting someThing like that would probably get bits of the someThing all over me, and when it is a someThing that smells that bad...
But that doesn't occur to me.

I just figure I'll shoot the Thing. So I grab my gun and aim it right at the big ugly Thing... and go figure, nothing happens.

The gun doesn't work.

Okay.

This is a problem.
A gun doesn't work, big smelly capital-T Thing of coldness trying to kill me problem.
At this point, I really should run away. It even backed off a bit when I got out the gun, though it's probably starting to realise now that nothing's coming of that... so now's really my chance, you know?
Except I don't.

No, now I charge at it. This Thing came out of nowhere and disrupted my lazy time! It had no right! Except more likely I'm just irritated because it smell so utterly bad, but whatever the reason, if there even was one at all, I go and charge ats the gorram Thing and start swinging at it myself with my gun.
Mind, this is hardly proper use of a gun, certainly not a Freyusna. Those things are expensive, but here I am swinging one at a Thing and there's more than a little contact... it's a huge target and it's swinging at me, too.
So I'm bludgeoning on this massive, hideous, smelly, blobulous Thing and it's swinging back and bits of it are going every whicha way and of course the smell is only getting worse and finally I reallise why the Thing smells so horrid in the first place - it's a great heap of rot and death, just ambled out of the crypt, more like than not. Probably missed Celiea completely because she had the sense not to antagonise it...

But after a fair amount of bludgeoning this Thing starts wearing down, and I mean literally wearing down, missing most of it's pieces and finally what's left of it submits and flees... well, lurches oozily, really. It's the remnants of a massive Thing, not some sort of balerina.
And I'm left standing there holding a probably most-certainly now busted gun surounded by chunks of this Thing that I'd been bludgeoning and Celiea walks out of the crypt all clean and cheery and happy-looking with her apparently quite good new data and I'm standing there covered in smelly Thing.
Now of course she has no idea what just happened and is all like, 'what the,' when suddenly the smell of the bludgeoned rotting Thing of coldness hits her and she pukes all over her data.

At this point, the sheer ridiculousness of what just happened hits me - I'd just bludgeoned a Thing. You'd think normally monsters like that would, I dunno, eat people or something, but I'd just bludgeoned it with a non-functional gun...
It's all I can do to keep from laughing. So I say the first thing that comes to mind.

"Hi... so... how was your day?"

And she's standing there all nauseous and trying to get the vomit off her notes and I'm all covered in Thing...

Yeah.


And that was quite probably the most interesting thing that has happened to me around a crypt. I never even went in.
A... Thing.