The Bleak Streets of Twokinds: A Twokinds Forum Noir Story

[MUDPUNISHER]

SCHRODINGER WHY?!?! THIS IS LITERALLY THE ONLY TOPIC I HAVE THE FORUM NOTIFY ME OF! Anyways... yea

[Schrodinger]

I think this is the fourth time I've been cursed out for this reason. I do it to keep this thread relevant and not let it slip into obscurity.

[foxlord]

Schro, while a noble thing, it still made me cry after seeing Av didn't post x.x

[avwolf]

Cry no longer. At long last, an update is here. Sorry for taking so long. I tried to write several times before, but each time I was forcing it and very little of that effort was actually good enough to keep. Fortunately, I was able to get into the grove for a couple hours recently and get a couple more pages together, and another couple plotted out.

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The thrum inside the club is almost deafening and absolutely intoxicating. One of our musically-inclined members, an Englishman, or English-lynx, by the name of Nuff is spinning records in the DJ booth overlooking the packed dance floor. A part of me longs to let myself be lost to the sound and the crowd; let myself be carried away in the press of bodies. I suppress the desire. I get any more repressed and I'll turn into Japan, but I've got work to do and I can't let myself get too distracted. Even so, all the people around me energize me; and I don't even like dubstep.

The flashes of neon in the spinning black lights look like they're mesmerizing Windwaker. I don't do anything to discourage the distraction. He starts to tap his foot in time to the noise of an angle grinder making love to a washing machine as I purposely lollygag around some of the newer portraits. Our artists must be going through some kind of “vehicle” phase, because most of the work seems to be of race cars or space ships. Windwaker tries to keep his eyes from shifting from me to the dance floor while I pretend not to notice for several minutes. Finally, as I stop in front of a pair of sketches -- a gun-toting wolf babe and a lithe girl who looked like some brightly colored equine-themed character turned human, I spare Windwaker a glance.

“Go on ahead. I'm just poking around. This isn't exactly the exciting part of an investigation. See if anybody's seen anything strange if you have a chance.” Windwaker is clearly torn, but epilepsy lights set to the soundtrack from an industrial appliance orgy finally win out.

“Okay, I'll find you if I learn anything. Just don't leave without me!”

As soon as Windwaker disappears into the crowd, I turn away from the dance floor and up the ramp to the top of the double-decker bar. I'm heading toward the old galleries, and it's faster through the second floor. I give the bartender a nod, a promise that I'll be back later, and go straight through the revolving door into the gallery section. Remember how I said this place was labyrinthine? I know where I want to go and I still almost get lost. There's so many doors, so many little galleries. Some of them still have the polish of an actively maintained shrine to art; others are dusty accumulations of photographs, paintings, and sketches. Even I've got a tiny chamber back here with my name on it, though it's so neglected as to be mercifully forgotten.

It takes me several minutes of navigating fashionably dim corridors before I reach the gallery I'm looking for. “Sapphwolf,” the plaque by the door reads. The thread's empty but for me at the moment, but if you know what to look for, you can tell that there's still some traffic in and out these days. Sapph's a close friend of mine, but he's busy trying to pay the rent in the yiff trade and can't spend as much time around here as he'd like. He keeps promising that's going to change, but we both know that he's got a basement to move out of before he can even think about keeping that promise.

The chant, repeated to me twice, was that there was a dead drop here in Drawing Board, concealed by “the couches.” There's only one thing that could be, considering Sithil's distaste for the phrase: an ongoing series of yiff work put together by Sapphwolf, featuring groups of furs, ah, interacting on a red couch of varying but always adequate size. The earliest pieces featured some of us forumites, back before demand drove the price to appear on the couch up around the GDP of a small country. You couldn't see them directly on display, per se, by order passed down by the founder and upheld by mods ever since. But if you knew how to get to them, they weren't that hard to reach, just technically not on forum ground. Think of it like a pornography embassy. That whole policy was put in place by the mod who walked this beat before me, and it was one of his ideas that I adopted as my own without reservation.

After a quick verification of my identity and interest in putting eyes on the couches, my vision fills with more dicks than an international XBox Live convention hosted by 4chan. Not exactly to my tastes, frankly, but I'm not here to admire the manhood on display. Some joker's put a wastebin between the frames of a couple of the couches and thrown a half box of crumpled tissues inside. At least I hope it's a joke. “Now, where could the drop be?” I slide my hands fruitlessly around the picture frames. The only thing I manage to accomplish is knocking the frames out of alignment. I go to straighten one, and bump into the trash can trying to get the image perfectly level. I recoil from the bin and its dubious contents, but catch sight of a bit of paper now sticking out from under the waste receptacle. Clever...The bin is the drop; it's got a false bottom, and the Laughing Cats' orders are hidden just underneath it.

I sort through the coarse pages under the waste basket. This paper has started to show up everywhere I go, it seems. The papers have been graced with the writing from several different hands. It's very difficult to make sense of any kind of a timeline or logic behind most of the orders. As far as I can tell, the oldest orders are written by just a couple, maybe three, different individuals. Over the top of those words, someone else, with very deliberate writing, scrawled the Laughing Cat's iconic “=3” in large script. The early messages are direct orders for hits or requests to con individuals into getting themselves in trouble with the mods, essentially indirect hits. I recognize several of the names mentioned. They'd generally been troublemakers. Most of them I personally disliked, though not enough to put out a death order on. A few of the other notes were written in the same hand as the Laughing Cat emblem on the orders. These messages are more inscrutable. They seem to relate to some kind of plan to destroy the city from inside, and watch the world burn.

The recent pages are almost entirely written by folks other than the original authors, like the Laughing Cat quit taking the original orders, or were released from contract, and instead of splitting, stuck around. The newer notes read like the Laughing Cat are laying the groundwork for something, but it's like the cliché: looking at a handful of puzzle pieces and trying to figure out the complete picture. The only thing I'm sure of is that I'm not going to like it. I snap some photos of the messages. Maybe I'll be able to piece them together later.

Reading through them, I find several mentions of Lupe. It looks like he was targeted specifically because he'd had some rough patches with the forum in the past. If somebody wasn't paying close attention, violence against him could be pointed at regular forumites. If the Laughing Cat were trying to incriminate the whole forum in a murder plot against the Luiigian, then they probably weren't going to give up soon. I needed to find Lupe before whoever he'd gone with dropped their guard. There are also a couple oblique references to Sable, but nothing that actually suggested a termination order. One, from the guy who scribbled the “=3,” mentioned Sable as a problem, but also as a valuable scapegoat, in case a mod started poking around. Why would they take a shot at their scapegoat? And if they were going to take the shot, why would they not kill off their problem? Why are the only answers more questions?

I tuck the pile of messages back into the trash bin. No sense in letting the Laughing Cat know that I found their drop. Then they'd just switch to a different drop, and I wouldn't get anything more from watching this one. Better to let them think that this one is still secure. I fit the false bottom back in place and slip through the door back into Sapphwolf's gallery in the Drawing Board proper.

[anonfox123]

*reads this update*
"Oh great, now I'm just going to go back and read the whole thing, aren't I? Well, there goes my weekend."

Good stuff, intriguing. I guess it's mostly people who have been here for a while who get cameos and roles?

[avwolf]

*reads this update*
"Oh great, now I'm just going to go back and read the whole thing, aren't I? Well, there goes my weekend."

Good stuff, intriguing. I guess it's mostly people who have been here for a while who get cameos and roles?

Well, at least it seems that way because it's about six months between updates. A lot of the most major of major roles were decided when I started writing years ago, so those characters certainly have been around. On top of that, a lot of characters are most appropriate for various parts and areas which don't necessarily come up right away (some of my originally recruited forumites still haven't appeared, for instance). But I don't have any actual restrictions on who get cameos, it just matters how they'll fit into the story. I've got several coming up in reasonably short order which are folks who haven't been around for five-plus years (or at least I'm hoping to get to those cameos in short order), so if you'd like to put your name and appearance in, please feel free to PM me. I like having a short physical description of how a forumite would like to appear, and any particular personality traits they feel really help define them.

I like having characters to work with, and the more cameos I include, the more I'm shamelessly pandering to my audience, which I do so love to do. There are a lot of individuals I still have to get worked into the story, some of whom I know exactly where they'll belong, and others who I'm still trying to find the right spot for, but that doesn't mean I won't welcome more.

[Schrodinger]

Ah, the red couch. I remember when that started and I struggled internally if I should put money on it. Oh well, too late now. In any case, I hope that preface there means that we'll be seeing more frequent updates to this wonderful tale.

[foxlord]

Haha, I vaguely remember the red couch. I don't go in the drawing board nearly at all but I have heard stories about it years past. Good times. Great update Av. Can't wait for more, whenever that happens to be!

[DariusL]

Great update Av. Loved the references to Jacobc62's cars and ReddwarfIV's spaceships.

I caught a typo in the 8th paragraph:

The only think I manage to accomplish is knocking the frames out of alignment.

Should be "thing" instead.

[MUDPUNISHER]

Forward ho! Lets see what's in store for us next!

[avwolf]

I caught a typo in the 8th paragraph:

The only think I manage to accomplish is knocking the frames out of alignment.

Should be "thing" instead.

Thanks, ticoun, I appreciate it. The error has been corrected.

[Nuff]

Wooo cameo!

[LuckyMudman]

Yep time to reread this, nice update.

Great work avwolf, now you busted me out of lurker mode.

[Schrodinger]

Hee hee. Cryptic instructions, conflicting motives, a mystery within a conundrum. What fun!

[JediGuy]

Ooh, very fun to read, Av. It's nice to come back to this and see there's still life in it, however sparse the updates might be. You've got me hooked, you ol' rascal.