#boiling pollution

They perceived the fact that something clean and fresh had entered their cubbyhole. Something on old, old parchment. Something in that swoopy handwriting like no other they’d seen, something Mr. P had been teaching them to read since they were old enough to focus on it.

They paused their music, paused their game (and right before they were about to challenge Sabrina again?), and brought the clean, clean parchment, a thing that had been created before their manifestation, toward them via amorphous sludge picking it up in a sort of hand. They read the message.

They knew that, somehow, Mr. Az could hear them when they spoke to his parchment. They’d never asked why - they figured it had something to do with the nature of him as a being, or perhaps he was just cool like that.

I’mmm hrgh fi- ne. Nothing to wor- worryyy pop pop pop about.

They folded the parchment up, slipped it inside one of their various pockets, with all the rest of the letters they’d ever been sent, turned their music back on, and returned to their game. Time to take down Sabrina - for the hundredth time.

The first clear noise they’d heard in weeks cut through the brain fog like a knife through amorphous sludge. Their eyes opened, seeping enough radiation to make a Geiger counter beep out the next dubstep hit. Gurgles and wheezed emerged from their maybe-mouth, but, as hard as they tried, they could not force words. They, instead, put all their energy into raising one truly horrendous arm. From that arm dripped their own body mass - with intention, however.

First a short drip. Then a longer one.

Next came short, long, short short twice.

Finally was long, short, long long.

The dim nuclear yellow glow of their ‘eyes’, hidden behind the oily-black, dripping, amorphous curtain of their hair descending over their face, brightened as they slowly seemed to realize something was before them. Every part of the world felt buried in molasses, their head filled with cotton and their hearing like underwater. They were slow. The world was slow. The world hurt, hurt like the first realization of mortality, of first betrayal, of first loss. Of a thousand little cuts over and over again.

Their ‘body’ sat slumped in the corner, tendrils creeping up the walls and keeping an eye on every corner of the room. Price sat just before the entrance to the throneroom. He looked like he hadn’t moved once.

Their voice puffed and rattled out, like an old machine being spurred to run just once more.

- @theangel-aziraphale

Just as the concept itself was omnipresent, so, too, was Pollution's knowledge of who acknowledged them. They seeped through the floorboards of the bookshop, squelching out the mass of their body through the cracks till they stood, hunched and fluid and wretched, nuclear yellow eyes glowing through the muck that was flowing over their face and melding with their torso, before Aziraphale. The hiss of the floorboards corroding was painful.

Almost immediately, the vaguely humanoid mass fell forward, flattening into a puddle with a cartoonish splat. Slowly, painfully, their ooze clawed on top of itself, rebuilding the horseman who was now sitting, possibly criss cross applesauce, on the floor. From seemingly nowhere materialized a dog who seemed one metaphorical high school credit from being a hellhound, bounding over to the suffering boy and laying his head upon their probably lap, somehow without melting into a puddle of bone marrow and tissue.

Following the dog was a very, very angry goose, a little itty bitty pink pig, two moths of different species, and twenty poison dart frogs, all rushing to make their way to the Boy. His eyes, now locked on the Angel, still glowed through the goop covering his face, and he was sucking the smoke out of a cigarette like their life depended on it. One could almost smell the rapidly flowing tears of climatologists everywhere.

Their mind was fog and molasses. Everything was hot and fuzzy and numb and nothing made sense. They could hear the brightness of the halogen lights on their face, taste the plush red carpet they were ruining. They melted further into their corner. Everything hurt. Thinking hurt, moving hurt - everything pulsed with agony, a heart pumping suffering through a vascular system.

They could still feel their flip phone in their goo, though. They could sort of make out the message.

cnt evn m

The classroom had only deteriorated, ceilings caving in and floor logged with water, walls crawling with mold and floor dusted with ash, particles floating through the air just begging to get into something’s lungs. Ooze seeped through brand new cracks in the floor, a floor now sticky with… something. Chemicals were spilled on the ground, glass shards joining the maelstrom of influence, and the pools of water in the corner of the room were already turning to carbonic acid and puddles of acid rain. The place was littered with trash and rotting life.

In the middle of it all sat the boy in White, now a boy in black, with their hair flowing down their back to join the puddle of their body pooling beneath their feet. Their head laid against their knees, all of their body made of rotting sludge with gasses bursting from it, flowing with power they didn’t know nor want. Their eyes were blank, both literally and in expression, swirling with greys and whites like a lava lamp. Eight blobs of ooze rotated just above their head, spinning in a slow circle.

They shuddered. A wave of something invaded the matter of their body, something all too reminiscent of the tarnishing of the Book. Their mass was in turmoil once more, at once going the goopy black, melting and rising and trying to claw itself back together.

They finally got themselves surrounded together, their frogs at the edges of their body all too full of a thing tainted that was never meant to be. They were panting breaths of smoke, eyes wide open with an innate sense that something was tainted, and that that something should never have been so.

sssssSome- thing… is hurgh tarnishe- d.

A drop of oil seeped from their eyes.

Some- wo- wo- one.

Not good. Not- not-not-

They pulled their melting knees against their chest, clothes passing through their body and coasting on their own ooze to a short distance away from themselves. They sat, ‘naked’, body mass coursing in convection currents as their frogs rested at their edges.