NATION

PASSWORD

Voyage Through the Multiverse (Open) [IC]

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Skylus
Negotiator
 
Posts: 6510
Founded: Oct 25, 2016
Inoffensive Centrist Democracy

collab between me, Naval, and Tau

Postby Skylus » Mon Feb 17, 2020 3:01 pm

TGWR
Manchester, Great Britain


Johann sat still as the VTOL craft carried him above Manchester. He had had to go through extensive psychological evaluation and tests to determine that Madison didn't tamper with his mind in any way or implanted some sort of mental command to make him her sleeper agent. If she did any of the two it would have spared him slightly from suffering through the fallout of what occured.

Being connected with the worst containment breach to date was something no one wanted and with a perfectionist like Johann, it was a bitter pill to swallow, a very bitter one. So many personal dead and missing, so many resources destroyed and some stolen, but the worst was that a large percent of the anomalies that were contained were now loose once more. The Imperative's operations in this world had suffered a severe set back.

Johann's years of excellent service was what prevented him from being demoted into a rookie or possibly terminated for the sheer level of incompetence most would think occured to allow for the breach of that scale to happen. Already he could tell some in the Imperative wanted him taken out from this assignment, whether it was because they fear he was mentally compromised to keep his position or they lost faith in his skills he didn't care.

As Johann clinched the data pad tightly, he was determined to show everyone in the Imperative that he could still be trusted with his position and that the Imperative would get revenge for what had occured back at Site-54. The director would hear from the pilot that they had reached their destination. The craft began to land in front of the building acting as a temporary parliament, at least until the one in London was repaired.

Johann would calmly walk out of the craft and walk to a group of soldiers. As the soldiers began to pat him down for any weapons he would be hiding away they would allow him to walk through, one joining him to guide him through the halls of the building to find the right room and to keep an eye on him. The journey through the building was quick and soon Johann would enter a large room filled with members of the UK government.

"Gentlemen. Ladies." He would say as he walked to the one empty seat reserved for him. "I understand you all have concerns over what occurred in our facility and the increase of anomalous incidents." He would place the tablet on the table. "This contains everything that occured but in short the witch called Madison Goodwill is to blame for what has occured on Site-54. Her and rifts." He told everyone.

“Madison Goodwill? One of the wizards?”

"Yes. The one that was once hailed as their heroine until the Ministry betrayed her during their war against us. She intends to stop you all from oppressing her people." Johann explained.

"She and others utilized rifts to exploit a weakness in our defense and managed to trigger a site wide containment breach so they could escape from our custody."

Just then, Madi appeared in the room with a flash of light and what sounded like a popping sound. She took a moment to get her bearings and then noticed who was in the room with her. The Witch didn’t say anything but merely froze and eyed Johann, wondering if they were going to kill her on sight.

Johann was finally moving his arm away from his eyes, an action he took to prevent from being blinded by the light. As his ears still rang from the loud popping noise that assaulted his ear drums his eyes would spot an all too familiar and detestable sight; Madison Goodwill.

The man would quickly reach for the hostel of his gun but find it wasn't there, confiscated during the check up. He would glare at her. "What are you doing here Goodwill?” He said with much contempt.

Madi looked around the room again before responding to Johann. “What I’m doing here is I’m going to try and convince you to not go after any of the offworlders, aka those that came through rifts. They’re not from here, they just got caught up in everything. I’ve got medieval people, anthropomorphic animals, super humans, different types of humans, a goddess, and who knows who else will show up.”

She took a deep breath and continued. “I’m not saying to get them back home, although if you think it’d be better in the long run, go ahead, but I’m afraid that after this whole incident with the airship, they’re going to try and go off on their own. They’d never survive.”

Johann placed his elbow on the table, clasping his hands together in front of his mouth. "You want their safety and freedom but not your own people? Have you abandoned them? " He asked her. "Regardless my orders are to reclaim the anomalies that escaped Imperative custody; which are the majority of the offworlders. I can't stop unless my superiors say otherwise. " he told her in a calm and collected manner.

More importantly Johann won't yield to her request, not after she tried to make him her puppet and after she killed so many of his people. No, he refuses to bend to her demand unless the Overseers order him to do so and he very much doubt they will give such an order.

“Okay, but have you considered that those that are off world don’t want to be captured again? And if you capture them, what exactly do you plan to do, send them back home? Detain them indefinitely? I mean, no one is older than twenty, I think, save for two people, they have no experience with modern detainment methods or being arrested and whatnot. However, if you want to take me in along with them, I could help...uh… convince then to cooperate, if you really want to detain them.”

Johann eye's narrowed. "You are arguing for the freedom of entities that possess a threat to people in your world? Before we contained most of the entities that you and your terrorist cell released they were responsible for many deaths in the United Kingdom; Czernobog being one of the greatest examples. Your group could have been an exception but then you and several others not only caused a containment breach that killed many people working with me you also tried to control me against my will." He told her with much edge on his voice.

"Some people in your group might be safe, but the majority of your group and the other anomalies pose too much of a great danger to humanity to be left alone." His eyes narrowed on Madison's eyes. "You fall into that category yourself Goodwill. How can we be sure that you won't harm someone with your power or subvert their will for your own gain? If you truly wish to show that we can trust you then tell the rest of your group to turn themselves over. We will decide who should be detained indefinitely and who can remain free."

Madi didn’t speak for a moment, then sighed. “I mean, most of us aren’t even twenty yet. They might fight you, you know, they might fight me if I tell them to surrender. But I guess they’ll be safer with you than with me. ...Alright, I’ll do it. On one condition - try to make everyone feel as comfortable as possible, I think they’ll be more likely to turn themselves over if you’ll agree to help them feel… at home, I guess. You could learn about other cultures that way too. ...And the riffs allowing everyone to understand each other helps… But under no condition can you treat anyone from off world like they’re ten. They understand things, maybe not modern, but just find out what they do know and go from there. Ask what their technology level is, what inventions they know of, things like that.”

"I will." He replied back. He didn't trust Goodwill but if he can end one potential threat then he will take whatever options are presented to him. "Still. What do you want us to do with your people? You were caught trying to gather information to form a resistance. Has your will to rebel snuffed out after escaping?"

Madi shook her head. “Not at all, I just figured I’d try to work with everyone if possible to solve this. What I want you to do in the long run is stop terrifying everyone and let them live their lives like they did before the whole Czernobog incident happened. Yeah, I know everywhere else has this problem, but I’d rather focus on here first. What I want you to do realistically soon is make a deal with the Muggles and find out a way for us and them to live in peace.”

"I have nothing to do with your people's situation, you will have to deal with the Muggles for that. I can only guarantee that your group might be safe, not the other witches and wizards."

Madi nodded and took a few steps back. “Alright. That’s good enough for me. I’ll get to Buckingham and tell everyone. I hope they don’t fight back or anything...Heh.” The Witch then apperated out of Parliament and to Buckingham Palace.

A second of quiet was held in the parliament as people gave each other odd and weird looks. A bush of laughter came from the whole parliament, what a wild request. The government is not going to give up the issue of the wizards so easily nor will they stop their current plans and actions underway. A random member of parliament yells, “Bloody good joke!”

Johann looked at the members as they laughed, staying quiet as he watched them. Once the laughter died down he would say. "My organization request permission to utilize heavier weapons and vehicles and for our air space access to extend to jets and other similar crafts. With many anomalies now loose we can't afford to just use our current loadout, especially as many magical terrorist groups have become much more active as of late."

Boris Johnson leans into another man’s ear, right of him, they whisper. Boris nods and leans back. “Let’s make this quick and easy. A rise of hands for yes.” A wave of arms goes up into the air. Boris looks around, he nods. “A rise of hands for no.” Arms drops and only a few hands are raised.

“Looks like that is settled. What do you want, but I am attaching oversight committees to your operations. Sounds fine?”

Johann wasn't surprised by the committee request, a small issue. "More armoured vehicles, tanks, helicopters and VTOL crafts that can fight along with carry troops, self propelled guns and artillery, jets and drones, anti air and ground guns, and perhaps mechanized walkers if possible. As for weapons we want railguns to accompany our gauss guns and possibly use direct energy weapons and anomalous weapons, along with rocket launchers and explosives." He would say, seeing all the parliament members' reactions.

"But the real major request is for the Argos to be in your airspace. We need a new base and the Argos fits it quite nicely. My request may seem to be excessive but I assure you, the threats we face will require what I suggested. More importantly some wizards seem to believe that our war never ended. I believe these groups will not only interfere with our operations they might attempt to use the anomalies as weapons against us."

Boris looks at Johann. “Your wishes will be given, but we’ll be watching you. Give us a few days, and make sure you contact our general staff and army and air headquarters.”

“I hope you know what you are doing.”

"We are. We've been in this business for a long time. You'll find that our methods are most effective." He told them. "I will meet with your military staff after we are done with this meeting. We will be repairing our old base while we use the Argos as our temporary new base."

“Anything else that we should know, or will that be it?” Boris asks simply.

"There might be the chance that an organization called GLADIUS may appear to cause trouble for you all because of you all working for us. Both the Imperative and them have history. It's best to let us deal with them unless we request assistance from your military and intelligence agency."

“Tell us about them. We’re in no rush.” Boris leans back into his chair as the parliament await an answer.

"GLADIUS is a splinter group that broke away from us. Some of the original defectors believed that the Imperative was compromised, either by inhuman forces or by the Overseers being corrupt. Regardless, the group sees us as the true threat to humanity. But other members are just mercenaries hired by them." Johann explained.

"They use technology stolen from others and other anomalous organizations, as well as invent their own devices. Their tactics even borrow some of ours but they are much smaller so they favor asymmetrical warfare tactics."

“I think everything is in order. This session is over….”

Johann would get up. "I will make my leave now. I have to see the general staff and air command to have my request approved and prepare my people for the move." The director would walk out of the chamber. His business in the chamber and building are now done. He has no other reason to stay.
Proud Member of OCReMix.org and Pixel Mixers
Like to draw, play piano, play video games.
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/mericalgirl1234
To avoid confusion on forums - I am female
VTtM: Madison Goodwill, Link (WW), Amaterasu, Alt. Future Link, Link (TP), Link (BotW) (I’m a Zelda fan okay)
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Aedroxus
Civil Servant
 
Posts: 8
Founded: Jan 25, 2020
Ex-Nation

Postby Aedroxus » Mon Feb 17, 2020 3:12 pm

Tides of Change
Kabal

Tath finds himself holding his breath as he watches the much larger, angular vessels beginning to approach, and smaller attack craft be dispatched. Fortunately the attack craft didn't seem to be interested in the Orbiter, but the larger ships were still facing them. "Ordis, can you give me an analysis of their combat capabilities?" He asks, glancing up at the ceiling. "Stand by, Operator... Analysis complete: they are -arMed to the tEEEEEEETh- far more capable than we are. I am detecting multiple turret emplacements, and they appear to be heavily armored. Our limited armaments are no match for them..." He replied, prompting Tath to grimace. "Right... We'll have to bet on the Archwing. Maybe our shielding can hold them off long enough for me to get inside and-" "Operator, we're receiving a communication, patching it through now:."

"This is Captain Wislon of the Vindicator, we wish to know who is within the vessel and your intention on the world?"

Tath pauses, thinking through his response carefully. So, they want to talk. Thank the stars for that... He thought, breathing a sigh of relief. He couldn't let his guard down too much however, as he still didn't know what their intentions were. "Alright, patch me through, Ordis." Tath commanded, and a beeping noise informed him that he was on. "My name is Tath Anthus, and I don't mean you or the planet any harm. My ship has been damaged by some kind of vortex, and I'm a long way from my home system. I would appreciate any assistance you could provide." He says, attempting to add as much authority and confidence to his young voice as he could.

Now to await the response.
"Dream not of what you are, but of what you want to be."

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Skylus
Negotiator
 
Posts: 6510
Founded: Oct 25, 2016
Inoffensive Centrist Democracy

Postby Skylus » Mon Feb 17, 2020 3:45 pm

Tides of Change

Doug was somewhere between space and the planet below. He had no idea where he was, nor if the ships above him were hostile, so he was waiting for some sort of response. And he got one. Three other space fighters were heading towards him, not exactly in the attack position but to someone not versed in fighter formations, they might think it was one. He then got a message over his comms system.

"This is Captain Wilson of the Vindicator, we wish to know who is within the vessel and your intention on the world?"

Doug flicked various switches and tested his comms before hopefully patching through.

"Hello Captain Wilson, you're speaking to second lieutenant Lincoln Douglas Forester of the Hyrulialus Royal Air Force, Farore division at your service. I came through a rift, one of several I've been through, I admit, and was wondering where I am. As for my intentions, well, if you're in some sort of war I'd like to stay neutral if possible, maybe get some supplies, possibly somehow get in contact with my commanders so they can speak to you."

Doug paused, then spoke again. "Permission to come aboard your vessel, sir?"
Proud Member of OCReMix.org and Pixel Mixers
Like to draw, play piano, play video games.
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/mericalgirl1234
To avoid confusion on forums - I am female
VTtM: Madison Goodwill, Link (WW), Amaterasu, Alt. Future Link, Link (TP), Link (BotW) (I’m a Zelda fan okay)
Hogwarts: Derek Forester, Madison Goodwill
RoP: Madison Goodwill, Link (BotW)

Love this site it is awesome, no I am not changing my flag because it is amazing.

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Naval Monte
Postmaster-General
 
Posts: 13807
Founded: Sep 04, 2014
Civil Rights Lovefest

Postby Naval Monte » Mon Feb 17, 2020 4:41 pm

Tides of Change

Wilson would wait for a few minutes before he heard from the mysterious craft.

"My name is Tath Anthus, and I don't mean you or the planet any harm. My ship has been damaged by some kind of vortex, and I'm a long way from my home system. I would appreciate any assistance you could provide."

The captain was not surprised to hear that, he heard similar reports from other star ship pilots that had their vessels sucked in by a rift. Most spaceships are not made to deal with the turbulence and forces exerted on them by that region of warped region of hyperspace and time. Wilson wonder if some ships just never come out after entering a rift? Either destroyed within or being forever trapped at a point between worlds until they run out of food, water, and even air until finally their ship runs out of power and the ship itself is drifting in the void dead, just like her crew.

"Jesus, that line of thought got dark very quickly. I've been working with the Imperative for way too long. It's starting to have a negative effect on my mental state" the captain put aside the morbid thought as he put his attention back on to the damaged craft.

"Captain Tath, what areas of your ship are damaged and how extensive are they? I can have a repair crew board your ship to try and fix some of the damages but I need you to answer me some questions before I do so. What sort of atmosphere you breathing in so I know my men aren't flying to a gas chamber. Do you have artificial gravity generators or plats? We can still operate with zero gravity.  What sort of technologies do you have? We might have incompatible technologies. More importantly, are you tied to any government or organization that we can try and contact?"

A lot of questions but that is the nature of First Contact. No doubt he will ask them some questions as well. Wilson wonders though if they should use their cover name or come clean to the poor sod?

Soon he would hear another comm channel open up and the voice that came through was one that brought mixed feelings with Wilson.

"Hello Captain Wilson, you're speaking to second lieutenant Lincoln Douglas Forester of the Hyrulialus Royal Air Force, Farore division at your service. I came through a rift, one of several I've been through, I admit, and was wondering where I am. As for my intentions, well, if you're in some sort of war I'd like to stay neutral if possible, maybe get some supplies, possibly somehow get in contact with my commanders so they can speak to you."

Damn it all, it was the elf. He was with them back in the previous war, he knows who they are. They even have their logo painted on the sides of the Dreadnaughts! There is no way for them to hide it from him. So far there was only one thing that he can say that was easy.

"Permission to board is a tall order to ask. It's a tight fit for our own fighters let alone another. If you want a free ride you are barking at the wrong fleet. If your ship has FTL capabilities than you might come aboard temporarily. Also you better have VTOL capabilities too, you're gonna need it for our hanger. As for war well there is one, but we are neutral and so is this world for now but there's a strong undercurrent of Separatism with the populists, so it may not stay neutral for long."
Naval Monte- The Mediterranean crossroads of mind-controlling conspiracies, twisted dimensions, inhuman depravity, questionable science, unholy commerce, heretical faiths, absurd politics, and cutting-edge art.

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Menschenfleisch
Diplomat
 
Posts: 766
Founded: Nov 01, 2017
Corrupt Dictatorship

Postby Menschenfleisch » Tue Feb 18, 2020 12:00 am

Secrets of the Raven | Jacquelyn

Everything thrummed to the rhythm of a palpitating heart, alien and swollen with bruises. Jackie felt her arteries and veins swelling, heard blood coursing through them: all in tandem with the capillaries in the ground and the sky. The air was thick and viscous: when she raised her hand it felt like she was kneading dough or sifting through mashed peas soaked in syrup. An oppressive presence beat at her and tugged on her skin, nudging her - body and soul - away from the spire. Invisible thorns dug into her skull, ensnaring her bones and marrow. She felt as if she was struggling against the pull of a dozen fishhooks embedded inside her body as she struggled to move forward; it seemed as if at any moment her flesh would give way and great chunks of her would be pulled away away. Her ears rang with squalls and shrieks, ribbons of colour swirled before her eyes and curdled: the brown of Terry’s eyes bled into his white sclera, the reds of the blood on his skin soaked into the stones beneath his feet. Hundreds of pairs of eyes followed her, weighing on her like lead nails forced through her skin. The world was fragile, as easily shaped as it was crushed. As she walked her feet left cracks in the cobbles. All conceptions of reality, all traits, were muddled here. Differences were extinguished. She heard blue, she touched red. If it had not been for the fact that her lungs and her mouth were no longer distinguishable she likely would’ve suffocated. When she looked to the star burning overhead, roundish fingers dug into her eyes, worming under her eyelids and picking at the nerves inside her skull. The city hated her, it reeked with a smell like sugar that’d been left in a saucepan until it had blackened and welded itself to the steel. Her own skin was marbled with fat and marrow leaking out from between the seams in her flesh. And at the centre, that apparent zenith of ubiquity - where reality should’ve been at its most malleable and generic - stood an island of stability constructed around Claudia herself. As the trio drew closer to her the city began to bleed away. The red light was left behind, growing cool and clear as sapphire glass. Their feet met grass whose green blades rustled as they brushed against their ankles. A cool breeze swept over the meadow, flanked on every side by forests and blue mountains peaked with dusty snow beyond. There was no sun or moon, just an infinite neptunian firmament, cosmic in scale yet intimate in hue and warmth. The soil was lush and soft as a mattress, letting out a pleasant crunch with every step. Each breath that Jacquelyn took was crisp and minty with an underlying scent like ocean water or a dog’s fur. Even the wind was kind, massaging her sore muscles and sealing her wounds. The colour returned to Elizabeth and Terry’s faces and their minds were set at ease. The two mages were momentarily stunned into silence and stillness. The emotional whiplash of transitioning from a muddled hellscape into the meadow had finally caught up with them and now, all that they desired was to rest. “Do you like it?” Albert gestured all around himself. “This is The Garden. Not the original one, of course, nor its cousin, but an iteration of Eden nonetheless.” He stood upon the steps of a basalt dias, at once overgrown and yet untouched by nature. Stone, vine and wood mingled to form its superstructure, with none of its components working against any of the others. It was not ruins: how it looked then was precisely how it had always looked and how it should’ve, too. A beam of light emanated from its centre, swirling into the sky and filling it with scintillating sparks: stars and nebulae were being spawned before their eyes. Terry conjured a whirring mass of warped spacetime, a broken patch of space. It coiled and glistered, like glass so transparent that it seemed to have no edges. “I have a score to settle. Get out of my way.” The corners of Albert’s mouth tended downward into a slim frown. White wings whose feathers were made of porcelain splayed out from his back, eclipsing the altar with a chorus of tinkling, twinkling, interlocked ovoids. “Son of Adam, can’t you see? You’re on the wrong side of history.” A fishhook of geometric sherds soared toward the angel. Terry’s hand erupted. His fingers popped out of their sockets and his joints were stretched until they looked like pieces of candy caught between the wrapper and a child’s teeth. Spacetime frayed and when it reasserted itself his hand was left in tatters, bruised and bleeding from a dozen places. There was a soft, wet plop; the pain only hit him after he looked down and saw that one of his fingernails had landed in the grass. He grunted and fell to one knee. God only knew how intense the agony was. Albert twirled the implement with which he had deflected the attack, a midnight javelin made of packed plant-stem wrapped in a helix around a thin rail of tin. Its head was a vicious thing, a flat leaf-shaped ornament which shimmered in layers as it rotated, revealing that its surface was covered in millions of barbs. It was mottled with brown and rusty patches; dried blood. “This is The Thorn, a spear made from the crown of Egyptian Acacia forced upon Christ’s scalp.” His face was immaculate, his expression unreadable. Albert was anything but forthcoming. As opaque as the five wings that he wreathed himself in, he was the very image of aloof and distant elegance. “You fucking…” Terry’s eyes widened as if pulled by the limbs of vices. He bared his teeth, curling back his lips into a deranged and yet calculating snarl. The angel sighed and moved his head in a slow and imperceptibly small circle, turning his nose up at the injured mage. “Oh, please. ‘Moloch’, you could never defeat me. Of the lieutenants I was second only to Diana.” He had a casual and pompous drawl to his voice. He sounded like a man who was bored out of his mind at a tea party, not a sentinel defending the end of the world.

Elizabeth drew and fired her pistol, pulling the trigger twice in succession, once at Albert’s chest and another at his head. The spearhead glided toward each projectile, arcing into their trajectories and causing each to burst into charged fragments of metal. Little nodules of cooling copper fell at his feet, their surfaces marred by the scars of heat and discharged magic. Terry clenched his unhurt fist next to the other and dragged downward as if he was trying to take off a glove and as he did so the skin on his forearms jellified and flowed downwards, covering his wounds. Jacquelyn clutched her ringing ears - Liz’s gun had gone off right next to her head - and knelt in the grass. The angel’s wings straightened themselves and formed a pale fresco of scales behind him, before all collapsing inward upon one point in front of him, producing a snap as sharp and agonising as the breaking of a bone. A gust of wind threw Elizabeth to the ground whose neck was yanked to one side by inertia and forced into her shoulder. The joints of her spine let out dull crunches while Terry was forced to cling to the soil with one hand and to shield his eyes with the other. Jackie was thrown like a bundle of cloth caught in a tornado, tumbling thirty or fourty feet before coming to a rest, spitting out wads of grass and mud and clawing at her tongue. The stench of mulch and moisture filled her mouth, grit and grains of soil clung to her fragile eyes. As her hearing returned she noticed a sound like pennies being poured out of a jar and when she opened her eyes again - squinting through the haze of torn up greenery and soot - she saw one of Albert’s wings, which he had positioned in front of himself, explode. Her vision was blanketed by an all-consuming blizzard of sharp white spines, each as long as her forearm and as wide as her wrist, oblong and razorlike. An expanding ball of flensing projectiles grew from the place where Albert’s wing had been, annihilating everything that it touched. It carved deep trenches in the altar, displacing stone as easily as plasticine, and gouged out huge masses of dirt. Just one of those shards would have been enough to end Jacquelyn’s life - to punch through her like a pencil through tissue paper - but none of them ever did. The space around her curled and the dozen feathers that would’ve impaled her fell into that curve instead, peeling away like banking jets. The ground around her was annihilated, resembling a pincushion more than a meadow. Elizabeth sat on her rump some distance away, one hand on the side of her head - supporting her neck - and the other still numbly gripping her gun. Terry stood in front of both of them, gaze fixed on Albert as he staggered, dribbling golden ichor from his back. His strength fled him for a moment and he fell on one knee, supporting himself with the spear. He mumbled inaudible words as anger flashed across his features. “Elizabeth, I’ll take care of this. You should get going.” He was putting on a good facade but his limbs shook, and so did his voice. “Fuck off Terry, you’re not even taking care of yourself, let alone this James-Bond villain wannabe.” She tried to stand but yelped and fell back down, laying a hand on her neck. “Let go of your hero complex. I’ll be fine.” He looked behind himself, appraising his friend. “I’m doing better than you are, at least… sorry, that was a little harsh.” A shadow eclipsed the field, drawing the trio’s attention back to Albert, who had once again raised his wings. Fluorescent yellow ambrosia oozed from his wound, splattering on the ground and leaving stains that resembled radioactive paint. His eyes were alight with focus. This was not the first time that he had been injured. Before Elizabeth’s very eyes, a spindly rope of porcelain sinew erupted from the wound, spraying a geyser of light into the air. Gray blisters, filled to bursting, covered almost all of its outer surface. They swelled and burst, revealing tiny, freshly-budded cloisters of feathers. More ropes and more scales emerged, each growing like trees in fast-forward. Elizabeth looked to Terry, standing unperturbed. “... you really want this?” He nodded, tightening his jaw. “Yeah. I do.”

“Careful now,” Albert called out as he rose into the air, two wings flapping behind his back and two held as shields in front of himself. The silhouette he cut and the shadow that he cast were enormous, practically blotting out the pillar of light behind him. “You’ve come a long way, Terence. I never expected you to drag your way out of the depths of alcoholism, but you did. Then you surprised me again by rejecting The Crimsonites and all that came with it. Now, you have injured a Seraph. Are you willing to die, knowing how hard you have fought to be here? If you die, there will be nothing that anyone can do. Your soul will be lost; you will never be a part of paradise.” Terry raised his hand and with it, a clump of earth studded with stone spikes. Albert’s own feathers were useless as weapons against him, they’d glance off his skin like raindrops on glossy leaves. “Shut the fuck up. ” Albert twirled The Thorn. Its tip seemed to wound the air itself, trailing ribbons of distorted and tortured wind. With every flap of his wings the grass rippled, sending waves through the meadow. “I’m warning you for your own good; let this happen. You’ll wonder in two million years why you ever wanted to fight me. Three billion after that, you’ll have forgotten about this moment entirely.” Terry strode forward, never looking away from the angel’s face. Elizabeth staggered to her feet and brandished her revolver as if to fight. She pulled the hammer back with her right hand’s thumb, feeling the cool, worn metal sliding beneath her grip. Beads of sweat ran down her cheeks. This was it. No take backs, no parlay. All her life, loss had seemed to be a constant companion. Her mother, her best friend, her foster families had all been taken from her by circumstances outside of her control or that she’d possessed no hope to influence. Now, however, she saw it all. Every possible consequence, every continuity that could stem from the moment she found herself inhabiting. The vague notion of grief she’d harboured all these years - that which she’d thought she’d come to terms with - crystallized into a diamond of determination. She would not fail, not so soon after finding her mother again. She wasn’t ready to plunge back into the life of the bereaved, that sycophantic cycle that smelled of hops and cigarette butts and which heralded so much self-inflicted agony. Terry blinked, and the colossal berth between herself and the steps of the altar became nothing. Space yielded before the overwhelming pressure of a man unwilling to recognize his own limits. Muscle, magic and desperation threw her forward. She tripped over her own feet and yet was determined not to fall. Her neck throbbed with every step, as if a hive of wasps were trying to burrow out from underneath her skin and erupt outward. The physical malaise, the ague and the emotional exhaustion of the last week tried to pull her back. The garden made her feel safe. Albert’s words, though made with mocking overtones, seemed kind and inviting. Her body and spirit wanted nothing more than to rest and were both convinced that wherever her mind was leading them could only mean certain death. She was a sprinter whose legs were failing underneath herself and whose brain insisted that she’d crossed the finish line even though she hadn’t just because it was in sight. In the corner of her eye a maelstrom of white - a four-cornered vortex which trailed golden sparks - clashed with something transparent and formless, a many-limbed error in the universe’s base code. Albert was like a bullet, using two of his wings to fend off any attacks from his flanks and The Thorn to pierce through any that came through the front. Every time he swung the spear somewhere, a one became a zero: whatever it touched ceased to exist or went back the way it came. Terry was forced on the back foot, hardly able to sneak in an attack between defensive acts. Out of everybody within the group he knew Albert’s limits best, and therefore he also knew that the odds of him being able to defeat the angel were slim to none. But he wanted this. He wanted to make him suffer, to hurt him; to bring the monster who’d pushed Claudia harder than anyone else to this point down to earth. To make god bleed; that was his goal. To punish the universe for doing all that it had to him, all that it had done to his friends. In that moment, as he fought, he was a distillation of his grief and guilt: an ageless, fearless berthage of emotion. He was anchored in place by hate and so, as anchors tended to do, he gave no ground. He tore Albert’s wings off like a kid plucking the wings off a fly. Every time they regrew he contorted them into alien shapes, mutilating the limbs beyond use. The Thorn shattered his defences so he stopped defending himself: he repositioned endlessly, ripping through spacetime like it was paper mache. Albert had always seemed untouchable, impervious due to his lackeys. Now that they were occupied with Berith, though, it became apparent just how unsuited to combat the angel really was. Though graceful and finessed, he lacked both power and the ability to improvise. Each time Terry threw him off balance it took him longer to recover, longer to strike again. His spear flagged and a tiny, infinitesimal particle of panic appeared in his eyes. That was all Terry needed as encouragement. He roared and let loose. If space had been a broken pane of glass before, now it was dust on the wind. The sky and the ground entangled, far became near, all irregularities clarified into a single perfect prism, cleaving straight through the angel’s torso. There was an impossibly loud crack, like a brick wall being pelted by a thousand thick-shelled eggs, and then there was a flash of light. Burning ichor sprayed outward in a gigantic horizontal V, with Albert laying at the junction point between the two lines making up the letter, wings and limbs in tatters. “Terry!” Elizabeth yelled, having stopped at the base of the stairs of the altar. Jackie stood beside her. “He’s down, Liz!” He tried to yell. But only a gurgle emerged. He heard a wet, muffled plop and looked down at his gut. A line of entrails hung from a gap in his stomach. Two severed coils of intestine dangled, not quite out of his body yet not quite within. He fell to one knee. When had this happened? How? Had it been the spear or had it been his own overexertion? He examined his hands for the first time since he’d started fighting and saw that they were matted with scars and lacerations. How long had that fight been? It felt like it had lasted half a minute but in retrospect it must’ve been far longer. His fingernails clung to his digits by scraps of flesh, his joints showed through cuts - deep and shallow. A waterfall of blood, staining his shoes and spoiling the perfect world that surrounded him. Even from where he stood he could see that Elizabeth was on the brink of running back for him, protecting him at the cost of the rest of the world. He couldn’t speak, but he could at least move his arms. As he fell to one knee he raised one arm into the air, giving her a thumbs up. He clenched his jaw and kept his lips tight and terse. There was no time to waste. She had to stop Andarta. The witch seemed to understand - however reluctantly - and turned around to run, bounding up each step. Then finally, with nobody to watch or take care of him, Terry collapsed. A comforting pain bloomed inside his abdomen. The pain felt like exertion, like self-flagellation, like redemption. He really was pretty fucked up. But in spite of everything, regardless of the kids he’d murdered, the calamities he’d been complacent in and the sins he’d committed, he felt fine. It was time to rest. And if he died in his sleep - if he bled out and Elizabeth cried over his corpse for a week or two - who cared? The world would move on. The anger, the smokestacks of envy and hatred that had fuelled him, was settling down - its journey complete. He felt his vision slipping, his senses dulling. Everything smelled a little like sawdust, and there was a distant chorus in his ears: the hallucinatory lullaby of death.

But then there was a twitch. Albert’s mutilated limbs, attached to his spine by cords of white fibre, began to move. Before Terry’s very eyes his flesh knitted itself back together, pulling distant giblets together and using useless lumps of adipose to form fingers, ribs, eyes. His five wings unfurled with a series of crisp cricks, undoing the vast damage that the spacebender had dealt to them. And just like that the angel was restored, leaking ichor from every orifice yet whole and able to stand. Terry tried to rekindle his spirit, his strength, but his muscles were already too far gone. The engine sputtered and died: the spark went out and the batteries were dead. “Liz...” he called hoarsely as the angel looked toward the witch. He wrapped his fingers around The Thorn and raised it into the air, balancing its end on his shoulder. “No… Liz…!” His voice was so inaudible that not even Albert noticed him trying to speak. The angel had never been incapacitated. In fact, Terry now understood that he could’ve ended the fight almost immediately after it had started, so great was his capacity for healing. His goal had not been to defeat Terry but to make him - and the two girls - believe that he had been defeated. Now, her guard was down. Now, she was more vulnerable than ever. His own words of assurance had doomed her - whether he had been tricked or had been stupid did not matter; he was culpable for whatever happened next, and it felt awful to know that. But Jackie, who stood beside Elizabeth, turned in that moment to take once last glance at Terry. She froze mid-stride and locked eyes with Terry, and then with Albert. Ponderously, she gulped and held up her hands. A white hot needle of fear, guilt and shame was thrust through her eye. It singed her thoughts and scarred her self esteem, but she had truly devoted herself to inaction the moment that she had seen what was about to happen. Albert nodded at her as an understanding was formed between them. She would not warn the witch, and he would not kill the firebrand. That was their unspoken, immediate contract. There was nothing that Terry could do but watch and feel all hope ebb away as Albert loosed his javelin. It hurtled through the skies, proud as an eagle and as precise as a hawk. It seemed to take hours to soar toward the witch, gaining height then slowly disposing of it yet never losing its wicked, lethal momentum. Like a sledgehammer punching through plaster it pierced her side, sliding cleanly through her body without lodging itself within her. There was a momentary pang of pain and then an utterly overwhelming numbness. Her legs gave way underneath her and Elizabeth collapsed, consumed by confusion as her body seemingly explicably lost its strength. It was only after that she hit the ground - hard - that panic kicked in and she became aware of the fact that she had just been speared. Her head, already injured by the earlier gust of wind that the angel had thrown at her, struck one of the steps’ hard corners and, with a wet crack, was thrust to one side. An ocean of pins and needles ran up and down her entire body. She couldn’t move nor feel, just languish inside her useless avatar of flesh and lie still as Albert rose into the air on marble wings and set himself down next to her, shoes clicking pleasantly as they met the basalt. As for Jackie? She hung back, hands clasped over her mouth, biting back endless empty apologies and trying to remain as inconspicuous and as obsolete as possible.

Elizabeth’s broken body lay upon jagged, broken steps. She called out to her limbs, willing them to do something - anything - but all the strength that they could muster only amounted to a single lonesome twitch. She felt the blood seeping through her clothes, blossoming out across her chest and causing her skin to wrinkle as it absorbed the plasma. Splotches of congealed red paste dribbled from her mouth and from her shirt and her eyes, bloodshot and criss-crossed with burst capillaries looked straight ahead. Albert stood two paces in front of her, his head upturned toward the horizon. He rested his palm on The Thorn, its tip gently sinking into the black stone underfoot. “Your kind never deserved Eden. The angels should never have been servitors, Yahweh’s blood should never have been spilled for you. Even now, he languishes on his golden throne, tears mingling with his blood. We will not make him whole again. We will forge a second firmament, grander than the last. You do not deserve that either, but you are - in spite of all that I believe - forgiven.” He turned on his heel and took one step, then another. Elizabeth felt so impotent; she could not even break his stride or touch his feet, she could only watch him recede from her sight. Her head was limp, her neck too broken to support its weight. “Who is Kether?” she wanted to ask, still striving for knowledge in what were surely her last moments. She knew that it was the end, that Claudia’s mission would be fulfilled. There was nothing that she could do to stop her own bleeding, let alone the arrival of the new world. Yet, she was not content to lie there and let it happen. She had only just found her mother again. The world she lived in was vibrant and wonderful; the people that she knew, the demons and sirens and skeletons - it would’ve been a disservice to simply give in and allow them to die. She laughed, spitting out a nugget of flesh bound together by dried blood. That was precisely Andarta’s way of thinking, wasn’t it? Her legs straightened underneath her and her arms reached out, gripping the cold basalt slabs with slick, abraded fingers. The pressure on her ribs moved down to her abdomen as she pulled herself upward, sometimes having to pause just in order to breathe. She felt no pain, only an intense cold that ran through her bones and seeped into her marrow. Her throat was bent; pieces of cartilage were no doubt swimming around within her connective tissues, pressing upon capillaries and arteries. But when she breathed next it was easy. Her choked windpipe, which had seemed to been on fire before, felt alright. It wasn’t that breathing had become easier but that she simply didn’t been any compulsion to do so, nor did the act carry any unpleasant sensations. The pain in her chest alighted and the light behind her eyes stopped fading. Was she dead, or was this part of the process of remaking the world? She felt a great pang of loss upon considering the first possibility. If she had died then she would have lost everything. Terry, her mother and everyone else would live on without her, forever locked within Andarta’s fortress paradise. Regardless, she felt certain that she no longer had a say in the outcome of this fight. No matter whether she was dead or not, she was simply too injured to continue. She found no perverted peace in that. Was it a noble thing to think? Rachel had failed in a similar fashion and had only been motivated to undo her loss even more than she had been to prevent it in the first place. Claudia had built her whole identity and life around the idea that she had failed Amelia and that the world needed to be corrected. Those two - those obscure titans - had been stoked by their shortcomings, fuelled to commit atrocity. She knew that it was a destructive path to go down - to strive toward an impossible victory - but what other possibilities remained? She couldn’t just give up, not after all that she’d accomplished and having met so many people who depended on her. She would’ve laughed if the act weren’t certain to kill her - she found it so ironic and so sad that she’d adopted the very mindset that Claudia had been consumed by. Ascending the steps was easier now, however; she was weightless and needless. As her hand rose to grasp the next step it trailed little beads of blood, round and perfect as nodules of molten gold. Skin flakes and crimson orbs hung in the air, encased in glassy time.

A boot appeared in her periphery, silent and slow to move as if struggling to push through a cocktail of syrup. She could not smell it, but she imagined that it would smell of shoeshine and turpentine, as it scintillated and shone like a polished opal. It shivered and inched forward, pushing downward instead of being carried by gravity. Her eyes traced the outline of the wearer’s leg. They wore brown kevlar pants - fresh ones, too, with crisp and cellular creases. It was an ugly scar on the perfect world that surrounded her - a disgustingly artificial material that threw her off balance not because she disliked it in any way but because it was simply so incompatible with its surroundings, like a grey-leaded scrawl in the middle of a watercolour vista. Although, it wasn’t as if their pants were the most conspicuous thing about them. All forms of thaumatology had their own distinct metals. Angelics had adamantium and silver, The Purgatorial Arts had brass and gold, alchemy had period one elements and artifice had its transition metals - but the apparatus that the individual before her carried seemed to be a cobbled-together crucible of different entirely unrelated elements. Iron gears interlocked with malachite teeth, pyrite stubs ground against aluminium plates. His belt was adorned with numerous whirring devices, their innards exposed and ready to crush an incautious user’s fingers. Their make was not as remarkable as their contents, however. Within, she saw glass and gemstone vials, pipes and receptacles filled with technicolour ectoplasma. She already had an inkling of the individual’s identity before she looked up and saw that it was Vincent, in all his siren-esque glory. Tired, haggard and bruised, he still gave off an unmistakably aura of majesty and beauty - not the seductive lust-inspiring appeal of incubi nor the regal and distant magnitude of banshees but something unique to sirens; looking at him was looking at the ideal man, a best friend, the most trustworthy co-worker in any office anywhere. He seemed to take notice of her starry eyed look, because he immediately cringed and looked away as he stepped away from her, taking long and deliberate strides. She yearned toward him, reaching out with a bloodied hand. Her mind was gone - weakened by pain to the point of primality. Her wounded consciousness was not capable of suppressing her instincts anymore, and even if it had been there would have been more important matters to attend to like telling her to stay still and keeping her heart beating. “What’s wrong with her? Why’s she grinning like an idiot?” The voice came from behind her, and it was muffled - as if spoken underwater. “Beats me,” a different voice responded - this one was clear as glass, unaffected by the effect that kept her blood afloat and the debris in the air suspended. Someone grabbed her shoulder and flipped her over. As they did so, she caught sight of a trio - two women and one man - on the steps, each one decorated by red lines and patches of peeled-back - or absent - skin. Injuries left by sharp objects: claws, blades and rubble.

Terry leaned on Metis - easily the least damaged member of the group - and knelt down beside Elizabeth. A trail of blood trickled from his mouth, not from his lungs but his gums, for he was clenching his teeth so hard that he was bleeding. His whole body trembled and dimly, at the back of her mind, Elizabeth realised that it was him who was holding the world in stasis; he had frozen time. In comparison to the others - Vincent, Metis and Mai - he moved with disconcerting speed, though that was only because everyone besides himself behaved as if they were sluggishly trying to push through an ocean of treacle. Jackie stood a few paces away, completely still. He had not seen fit to include her in the list of people who deserved to move through a motionless world. “She let this happen,” he half-growled,half-muttered. His words were slick and wet with brackish fluid; blood, saliva and stomach acid. Various parts of his intestines bulged where blood had pooled inside them, causing them to sag. The gash that Albert had left inside him had been patched up with some shoddy spatial tunnels - reconnecting the severed ends of his small intestine to one another - but he was still losing a lot of blood and was still in a lot of pain. Elizabeth, however, was in far worse condition. She was surrounded by a halo of her own blood which flowed down and pooled on the interior edges of the stairs. He dipped a finger in her blood and raised it, watching it squirm on the end of his finger. “Tenebraes. They’re filling her arteries, trying to keep her blood pressure up.” But the problem was that the Tenebraes were only capable of filling up space - they couldn’t carry oxygen. If her injuries were not sealed, she would asphyxiate. In fact, she was already half-way there. “Think we could perform a transfusion?” Metis drawled drunkenly, almost unable to move her tongue. “Do any of us know her blood type?” “It doesn’t matter. I’m a universal donor.” Vincent interjected. His voice cut through the air, crisp as the edge of a saber in spite of his slur. “Is siren blood even compatible with a human’s vascular system? And a magical human’s, at that.” “It should be. I gave Claudia a healthy… well actually, an extremely unhealthy dose of it while I was nursing her back to health.” “Fuck it. Let’s try that then.” While Mai bound Elizabeth’s wound with layers upon layers of bandages, Metis drew a needle from her pouch and stuck it in Vincent’s arm, drawing out just over three quarters of a litre of blood. As soon as she pulled it out of his bicep he swooned and clutched his head, his face pale. “Dammit… I thought I’d gotten used to that sensation.” They all knew that the procedure wouldn’t bring any miraculous results - it’d take a minimum of half an hour for her body to re-oxygenate itself and she’d lost far more blood than Vincent could give. The transfusion would not dredge her faculties up from the depths of her subconscious, only keep her from slipping even further into the dark than she already had. The needle met her arm and at once, life was pumped into her veins. “Hoist her up. We need to go.”

Elizabeth dipped in and out of consciousness for a while. However, along the way, Mai told her many things, whispering in her ear while they - the “abdominal wound gang” as she had dubbed them - were carried upwards. “You know, Vincent’s not on our side as much as we’re on his. He wants to stop Andarta more than anyone else.” He nodded in the spirit of affirmation. The pyro kept talking. “You know, we nearly took each others’ heads off when we first encountered one another. It didn’t take much time for us to realise that we were on the same page, though. He’s got a real way with words.” That last statement went without saying. “The decision to turn around came down to me in the end. I said hell yes: like hell I was gonna let the others seize all the glory for themselves. I didn’t think we’d be making a bee-line straight to Claudia, though. If I had been on my own I wouldn’t ever have trusted a sweet-talking siren but ‘cuz Metis was there I knew that I had an impartial adjudicator on my side. That’s how I knew that we weren’t just going to be led into a pitfall trap or something.” Ten seconds may have passed from the transfusion to her reaching the top of the stairs, or an hour might’ve. Whatever the case, as soon as she got there, she was shaken back into the here-and-now. Her mind snapped into focus by the sight of The Spire. It was not a beam of light but a thread: a single infinite length of silk which extended into the sky and burrowed deep into the ground, vibrating like a violin string as it dictated the laws of reality. Andarta stood just in front of it, brushing her fingers over it with her eyes closed and her back to the group. With every motion she changed the pattern of its vibrations just a little - modified the song of the cosmos a tiny bit. Already, her song - that of paradise - had spread a dozen kilometres in each direction. The horizon kept getting farther away, the sky kept becoming more defined. Soon, Lludw Cigfrain - then Earth - then the universe - would be engulfed by it; added to its eternal harmony. The Corpus Obscurus, the metaphorical sheet music, and the smaller spire, the fiddle’s bow, were clutched in her bony hands, knuckles white yet fingers firm. Here, the song of creation was utterly overpowered. Everything rhymed, for lack of a better world. Each rock was perfectly in tune with every brick, each part of the sky worked harmoniously with each other. East and West formed chords together, up and down followed one another in a strange and lovely ballad. The air was sweet and smelled of apricots. The clothes on her back rubbed against her skin as if nuzzling her in embrace. Her lungs, her heart, her mind were almost paralyzed by total and utter complacency. This was where she was supposed to be. This was Eden. There was no anomalous effect in play nor any compulsion: the world that Andarta wanted was simply this beautiful. Terry’s spell broke down and time resumed its natural course. Yet, even as the horrible burden of gravity and the terrible need to breathe returned to her, Elizabeth did not complain. However, she screamed - and loudly at that - when she laid eyes on Vincent. Anyone who didn’t conform to Claudia’s desires, anyone who rejected this reality, stood out like a sore thumb - they physically fell apart, their skin flaking off and their eyes glazing over with the cream of nonexistence. Bits of fleshy sludge sloughed off of Vincent’s face, transforming into gemstones as they hit the ground. He held Claudia in far too high an esteem, and wished the best for her with far too much passion to accept the advent of this reality, whose birth would spell her eternal damnation. Mai and Metis, however, dropped Elizabeth and Terry on the ground. He caught himself in two or three strides, his knees buckling but otherwise remaining upright. His fury, his uncomplicated wrath worked alongside his boiling shame in order to keep him going. But Elizabeth, she fell and would’ve broken her nose on the stone if it had not been rendered incapable of harming her. Indeed, she could slam her fist into the altar until her bones should’ve split without feeling a single iota of pain or suffering injury of any kind. She felt at such ease. Would it do any harm to just give up? All this time she’d been chasing Andarta’s tail, trying to stop her simply because she seemed to be evil - the quintessential mad cult leader. But now that she knew more, now that she knew better, it had become exceedingly obvious that at heart, Andarta was just… she was just… good. There was no other word to describe her. She wasn’t a paragon, she wasn’t a villain, she wasn’t a hero, she wasn’t even important, she was just good. Vincent tried to call out to her but his words were drowned out by the song. He was not part of the tune - his speech was annihilated even before it left his mouth. Already, his arms were adorned with old, black scars which wept crystalline, sandy blood. The world did not act out of malice or even self preservation - they simply could not coexist, and those who rejected it insisted on continuing their incursion. If Elizabeth had possessed a reason to reject Claudia’s new paradigm then it had already been rendered irrelevant; she could not muster the strength nor the raw emotion to fight back. She simply lay her head down on the rocks and closed her eyes while the melody curled around her, folding in on her like a blanket.

*Twang*. A gunshot-snap sounded out. The chorus stopped, their throats torn out. The musicians laid down their instruments and let their broken bodies be carried away by the stagehands. Every minute little bit of beauty was violently torn from the world. Elizabeth’s mind was vivisected by the ugliness of the universe, by the feeling of total loss that she felt. Even though the air was as it always had been, it felt acrid and caustic and it burned her lungs like formaldehyde. Every sound - even that of her own breathing - grated on her soft eardrums, threatening to burst them, for they were so discordant and insufferable. As she opened her eyes she was struck by how harsh the light was and how monstrous her own nose was. The taste of her own saliva on her tongue was bitter and sickening, like she was gargling thick pus and warm sewage mixed with ground-up glass. When she brushed her fingers against each other she was debilitated by pain and the coarse, disgustingly uneven texture of her skin. This was not the way that the world was supposed to be; how could anyone live like this? How had she lived like this? She looked up, enraged, to find the source of the disturbance and saw two figures silhouetted by the string, their bodies twisted and contorted in a ghastly waltz. A man stood over Claudia, a spear’s handle in one hand. Its sundering edge could not be found, for it was occluded by the folds of her flesh. He held her at arm’s length, the spear buried inside her heart, twisting and festering as it was marinated with her blood. With a cruelly gradual flourish he pulled the deadly missile from her chest and flicked it once, painting a thin red arc on the ground. The skies turned black and cracked like drying mud. The meadows screamed and shrivelled, melting and solidifying into lumps of pocketed stone, resembling oversized scabs. The already painful state of existence degraded further. In spite of how much she wanted to, Elizabeth did not faint. The attacker turned and its wings bloomed out of its back, casting a devilish, gargantuan shadow over the altar. Andarta twitched and shuddered - she barely bled, so little blood was left in her body. Her hands grasped at the edges of her wound, trying to pull it closed. “Claudia!” Vincent shattered the silence. “Albert.” Terry stated, voice devoid of emotion. Behind the two men, Mai and Metis lay on the ground, retching and emptying their guts as they acclimated themselves to having to experience the real world once more. Although Elizabeth had experienced the effect to a much lesser degree she still felt like a newborn, naked and vulnerable. The shackles of gravity and arthritis held her down, resisting her every effort to move. ”What the fuck? What did you-” Jacquelyn arrived at the edge of the dias and cast her gaze over the present scene. She took tentative steps forward, one foot over the other. ”You…. You fucking...” And for once, that steely glimmer returned to her eyes; that which had been absent from her for two weeks. She stepped in front of Elizabeth and for a moment the witch could not feel anything but awe. But then Albert glanced at her and more importantly, so did Vincent. That confidence dissolved, leaving her bereft of purpose. ”This… I-I thought...” her voice tremored. Her words were pizzicato, barely enunciated beyond their first syllables. ”Come on, Claudia. Don’t do this to me. Christ, I… I thought I’d have an opportunity to do something good for once, and… god, no. Please, no. Don’t let this be happening...” The angel cocked his head. “You have a strange choice of companions, Ashwood.” The words, although they came from an enemy, were utterly scathing. She felt them dig into her skull and rip at her self-image. She was caught in a vice, and each of the vice’s arms were the judgemental glares of those around her. “She’s not with me.” She knew that Elizabeth wanted to say it. She knew that the Witch didn’t want her here, she knew that she couldn’t be forgiven - and wouldn’t, ever. This wasn’t how anything was supposed to be. She just wanted a simple, happy life. Why couldn’t cowards be cowards without being condemned for it? It was so unfair, so ridiculous! But she had no energy or confidence to spare. All she could do was accept it with a quiet placidity and retreat. And she did so, stepping back and practically using Liz as a shield. “Come on,” the angel continued. “Look at me.” He raised his wings and formed a dual-arch above his head, holding them up like swords hung on a wall. “We are infinite and unmatched. We are not legion, we are phalanxes and battalions.” A thousand brilliant halos of light sprang into existence around him, blotting out the sky with blistering white judgement. They were not independent entities, they were manifestations of Albert’s power; a conduit of the heavens. “Just give in to your basest desires. Let a new reality come about, where you will not need to think for yourselves or wonder what tomorrow might bring. Any further resistance is hopeless. If you die here - and I swear that you will should you choose to fight - your souls shall be taken to Heaven. I’m certain that you can fill in the rest of the dirty details.” He rose into the air, each flap of his wings producing an air current that threatened to sweep the group arrayed against him away. He brandished The Thorn, letting it sway gently in his hand. “Come on, then. Give me your answer. Will you surrender, or will you condemn yourselves? I genuinely don’t know and honestly, I find that rather sad.”

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Skylus
Negotiator
 
Posts: 6510
Founded: Oct 25, 2016
Inoffensive Centrist Democracy

Postby Skylus » Tue Feb 18, 2020 12:07 am

Tides of Change

The pilot eyed the three ships as they drew closer and spoke again into the comms. "Noted. I've got both, don't worry. I assume these ships are going to escort me?"

The Great Wizarding Rebellion
Buckingham Palace Courtyard


"Are you alright? There was a terrible sound and now I can't see much. I am surprisingly uninjured, although possibly disorientated." Biblo tried to figure out where he was as he realized someone else was in the room he was in. It appeared to be some sort of food storage area.

"Who, me?" Po appeared from another room, having found some sort of food. "I'm fine. I came back here to find food, I dunno what exactly happened." The panda pointed towards what appeared to be a door. "I think we can leave through there."

The two ventured from the kitchens into a broken ship. From where they were standing, they could see out both ends, the back end of the ship was ten feet away, mostly destroyed, while the front of the airship was half submerged in the lake.

"That looks bad."

"Yes it does."

Shimmering water reflected on the colored glass as the young Hylian awoke. Blood stained both the glass and the console, while the bodies of several Kremlings had been thrown across the room. Link picked himself up from where he had woken up and silently watched as various fish swam up to the glass and then swam away, out of view into the murky water. Then something huge hit the glass and it cracked.

The Hero of Winds froze and waited for the thing to appear again. It did so a minute later, striking the glass with the full force of its scaled body. more cracks appeared, then the glass shattered and water started rushing in, the current causing Link to be propelled from the sunken airship into the lake.

He looked up at the surface, before rolling to the side as the scaled creature launched itself towards him, then reached to his side and drew the Master Sword, the blade's glow lighting up a small portion of the lakewater around him. The thing swam at him and he swung, the blade connecting and sinking into the beast's skin. He could hear it roar and the creature twisted its body around, blood flowing from the wound and dissolving from the water. The creature than swam away and Link decided to head for the surface.

He didn't get very far as he was swimming upwards, before a rift appeared before him and another scaled creature appeared from the rift, before it closed. The creature seemed as surprised as he was, as it didn't attack him, but rather went after the other scaled creature. Link didn't stick around to see which of the two was the victor.

As soon as the Hylian broke the surface of the lake, the front of the airship started to slide into the lake and Link swam away from the wreck to avoid being pulled under. he didn't get far enough away and he was in fact pulled under by the wake of the wreck. It took a few seconds for Link to get his bearings, but then noticed that something was swimming towards him at a high rate of speed, and that he had no chance of dodging it.

Ganondorf supposed he had every reason in the world to be annoyed. He had been taken from one situation to another, the flying metal ship they had been on had crashlanded, its occupants scattered, and there were numerous dead. Surprisingly, some were uninjured, mostly those that had been near the middle of the ship, others were too far gone to be helped.

Dragmire had found some members of the rag tag group already, namly the talking bear and small person. he had told them to search for the other members of the group and to bring them to where he was now - about twenty five feet away from the palace. For some reason, the entire grounds seemed to be unguarded, but perhaps everyone had been scared away from the airship crashing.

Several minutes later, most of the group had found each other and were now very close to the palace. They were mostly waiting for Madi to show up, whenever that was. However, there was one person that was notably absent.

Link was somehow back inside the doomed airship, although he wasn't sure where he was. The light from his sword only lit up what was directly in front of him, nothing else, and he currently didn't know what he was looking at. He soon realized this piece of warped metal had once been a door, and that cold air was seeping through cracks - another room. The Hero of Winds moved closer to the destroyed door and cut through the metal sheet with his sword, then stepped through into a completely dark room. Not even the holy light of the Master Sword could pierce this darkness, and Link suddenly felt very alone, not to mentioned trapped. 'Right. Just have to pick a direction and start walking.'
Last edited by Skylus on Tue Feb 18, 2020 4:09 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Rostavykhan
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Founded: Sep 30, 2017
Corrupt Dictatorship

Postby Rostavykhan » Tue Feb 18, 2020 2:41 pm

"Um...hey. Vikky? Yeah, it's me."

Constance sniffled. It was cold outside, but at least the phone booth provided some protection from the wind. It was only five, but it felt like midnight, with how dark it was getting. A storm was rolling in.

"Hey, Connie. You okay?", Her older sister asked. Constance snapped back to the present. "Hmm...yeah, I'm fine.", She said. She leaned her head to one side, nestling the phone against her shoulder while she reached into her coat. She was eyeing a map, though she was only half-paying attention to it. "Oh, that's good.", Said Victoria. The sounds of laughter echoed behind her, distant. Constance perked up again. "So", She asked, tucking the map away again. With her free hand, she began to rub the back of her neck, and then idly scratch at it. "Are the kids okay? I, uh, wanted to make sure."

"They're fine.", Her sister replied. Constance smiled, although it was fleeting. "Good. That's good.", She said, nodding. "I, uh, I wanted to say that, um...well, you know.", She trailed off. "You know, rehab and all."

"Oh yeah. I'm glad.", Vikky said, sounding genuinely relieved. "I'm happy for you. And, about Pat, I-"

"It's fine.", Constance waved her off. "Look, I know you don't really think anything weird happened, but, like, I'd told you about the weird shit that happens here, right? Found part of the boat out near Carrow Lagoon. Nobody sails out there. Fishermen all say it's, like, got "bad air" to it or something. I don't know, but I was looking at the library, and there was some stuff about disappearances going back to the town's founding, and then there's that old church, and-"

"Connie.", Her sister cut her off this time. Her voice sounded heavier than usual. "Look...I'm glad you're not using, or not using as much, but..."

"But what?"

"Look, I just don't think doing all that ghost hunting stuff is any more healthy. I think you're looking too deep into things, you know? I know the place is a little weird, but sometimes bad things just happen, you know?"

Constance pursed her lips. Her sister wasn't interested. As usual. "Yeah.", She said, angling the phone away so that Vikky wouldn't hear her sigh. "Maybe you're right. I know, it's weird and all. I'm just going to go give it a little look, and then call it a day. Or whatever. Call it quits."

Vikky didn't respond for a moment. The air seemed heavy. Finally, after a few seconds of tension, she exhaled. "Fine.", She said. "Fine. I, uh...I get it. Go do what you need to do then. Just be careful, okay?", She asked. Constance's pursed lips became a smirk. Be careful? It wasn't like she'd been going around the town guns-blazing. She'd just been doing some research about all the weird disappearances and hauntings there, which...well, actually, that wasn't exactly the safest thing to be doing, but she digressed. She'd been careful. "Will do.", She said, chuckling. "I'll only chase, like, one monster, okay? Oh, by the way, um...", She paused. Vikky piped up. "Yeah?", She asked; Constance cleared her throat and leaned back against the glass of the phone booth. "Mind if I say hi to them? The kids?"

A short pause; there was a quick "sure thing.", from her sister, and then silence again. Constance felt her heart sink a little. It had been a while since she'd seen them. She didn't call as often as she should have, either. Would they be happy to hear from her? She didn't want them to be mad.

"Hi, Mom!", A voice piped up - her boy, quickly followed by his sister. Constance clutched the phone and laughed. "Hey, kiddos!", her voice rang out; it was like she had just turned into a different person. "How are you guys?"

"I'm playing with-"
"-we're playing with the new toys you got us!", Her daughter interrupted. Constance chuckled. "I'm glad you like them, honey. Please don't interrupt people, though, okay?", She asked. She could heard the girl squeak, and her son leaning into the phone again. "Okay.", The girl replied, almost a whisper. "Good girl.", Said Constance. The kids at least still listened to her; that was good. As she spoke with them, she craned her neck and looked down the street behind her, as a single car turned down at the edge of one of the residential areas. She stared out at the sky, at the approaching storm clouds, until her kids spoke up again. "Momma", they both called out.

"Hmm? What is it?"

"Will you come get us soon?", Her son asked.

She felt a pang in her chest. Constance hung her head a little lower, and leaned forward against the phone, burying her forehead into her elbow. "I'm sorry, kiddo.", She said, after a short pause. "I wish I could. I know you wanna come home, but right now Momma's really busy. Is everything fine with your Aunt?"

"Yeah. I just want to spend time with you.", He replied. "Me too!", Her daughter piped up, the two huddled around the phone on their end. Constance nodded slowly. She felt like shit for not being there for them.

"I know. I'll be there the second I'm able to get out of town.", She told them. "Until then, I just wanted to make sure everything was okay over there. When I make it over, we can get everything and go back to the house, okay?"

"Okay!"

"Okay then."

When she made it over there...she would be getting her kids back. After that night? She needed to find what she was looking for. Even if nothing came up, she was going to go pick her babies up, but she needed to find something to let her know what really happened to her Husband, just for some closure. She didn't have a lot of time to do it, though. She needed to get a move on.

"Well, kids, I'm just glad you're both doing alright.", She said. She began to kick at the floor, eyes on the ground. "I gotta go now, so I guess I'll see you two and Aunt Vikky later, okay? That sound good?", She asked. Her kids both responded with an "okay" and an "I love you", to which she told them the same. It was hard to do, but she got it over with, and then set the phone back, and walked out of the booth, back to her car.






It was cold - no, freezing. The wind alone seemed to cut right through her coat. The rain wasn't far off now, and that would just make things worse. It was hard to find her way around outside, as the sky was so overcast, and the new moon meant that there was no amount of moonlight to peak through the clouds any way. The howling of the wind made it hard to hear much, too. Constance hugged herself tight and forged ahead through the fields, tall grass bending and whipping back and forth at her legs. The dim lights of the town were behind her now, and even the looming silhouette of St. Brigid's was hard to make out. Past that point, she was alone, and in weather like the storm that was rolling in that night, she'd be truly isolated, if she was forced to take shelter.

Her teeth chattered. She tried to tense her jaw, but it barely helped, because that was shaking too. Everything was shaking. Her legs were freezing; she should have gone home to get some pants before deciding to run off to snoop around. When she was in the phone booth, she'd at least been protected from the elements. Out past the edge of town, The Old Church was one of the few places that provided shelter, and, well...there were good reasons why people didn't go to the Old Church. Unfortunately, where most people avoided it, even during the day, Constance had to give the place a look. Legend was, the Old Church was where a lot of people went missing. It was haunted, ever since the town's founder had killed some witches near there.

The thunder echoed overhead. Constance approached the church grounds, finding the area fenced off and gated, thick black fencing surrounding the entire area. The gate itself was locked as well, or it had been locked, had some local teens not recently taken bolt cutters to it...again. Likely highschoolers going in to play some scary games, or smoke pot, or both. Constance would have done both. That thought made her chuckle a little bit, alleviating some of her anxiety. She pushed the gate open, stepping onto the Church grounds, the old building looming over her now. Her heels crunched against dead leaves, her hair blowing around as the wind kicked up. She approached the front doors, one slightly ajar, and paused for a moment. Something seemed off, even more than in the hospital. At first she chalked it up to just being spooked, but just as she approached the Church, the sensation that something was really, really wrong hit her. Almost on a whim, she reached out with a gloved hand, her knuckles gently brushing the door. She couldn't explain why, but somehow the door felt like it didn't quite fit the place - like it was a little too new. It didn't look new, but three-hundred year old doors should have been a bit less sturdy, right?

Behind her, Constance heard the gate squeak again. Her blood ran cold. She reached back again, already moving for her revolver as she turned to look, but she was too late. She saw it sprinting towards her - a person, or a beast, or...a thing. It was like a dog, but way too big, and way too lanky. It certainly didn't look like any animal she'd ever seen. Her panic rising, she didn't waste any time, kicking the door open, running inside, and slamming it shut, barely getting the door to click before the beast slammed into it, shaking the entire frame. Constance screamed and leaned in, back against the door, praying that thing wouldn't be able to get in. She thought she could hear it sniffing at the door, and then the sounds of clawing and barking as it tried to barge in, finding little luck. A few more slams shook the door, but when it became apparently that there was no getting in, the creature simply resorted to howling. Still, Constance locked the door, stepping away and taking aim for a minute. She stood there, waiting for something to happen, but...nothing. She finally exhaled and began to back away from the door, although she kept her revolver drawn now, not wanting to take any chances. Outside, the howling was slowly being drowned out by the sound of rain and thunder, and by the howling of the wind itself.

Stepping away from the door, Constance entered the main hall of the church. While not as big as other Churches, it was a surprisingly spacious place on the inside for a simple colonial building. The walls, once white, were browned slightly with age, and the old wood floor was faded and scratched. The main hall stretched on towards the back of the building, forking into a T at the end, while a staircase was situated to her left, and an open entrance to the main service room on the right. One detail, which Constance hadn't noticed earlier when she was attacked, unnerved her about the building, and that was the fact that she could see so well. There was light - candles and lanterns - to illuminate the place. Why were there lit candles and lanterns in an old church that was supposedly abandoned? That was definitely suspicious. Even if she hadn't been stalked and charged by that dog-creature, seeing the lights was enough to confirm that something was off with the building. The question now was, why were there lights, and who had lit them?

She was scared. She was nervous. She was also now very intrigued. Slowly exploring the church, Constance peered into the service hall, eyeing the rows of empty pews, and the podium ahead. A large, wooden cross hung on the wall, but it was worn with age, like the rest of the church. Large windows lined the walls, all intact. Beyond them, the world was nearly black, only the occasional flash of lightning against swirling clouds revealing a glimpse of the world outside. Despite the situation at hand, the place seemed almost quaint. Several pews were damaged, though, and the podium itself was very worn. Immediately above the entranceway, Constance observed an overhang, indicating a balcony that would overlook the hall. That was where the staircase led to, presumably. Before going up there, she decided to explore the rest of the ground floor, which, for the most part, seemed oddly mundane. There was a small closet under the stairs, which was locked, however. Down the hall, there seemed to be a small kitchen or gathering room, which was largely empty, save for some ruined tables that were pushed into one corner. A back door could be found there as well; Constance shuddered, hoping that it would remain as sturdy as the front doors.

Constance moved to the second floor, finding that area to be more interesting. There were two doors, one locked, the other with the doorknob busted. The balcony area was situated ahead of them, but before she checked that spot, she entered the room with the busted door, the frame creaking a little too loudly for her liking. She became nervous once more when she saw the room to be dark, with no lights in it like in the rest of the church. Why was this particular room dark? Thinking quickly, she used her free hand to reach for her lighter again, happy to have at least a little source of light to help her see in there...until she wasn't. What she saw when the light reached into that room made her sick. Blood, and a lot of it, lined the walls. Blood, and gore, and bones.

And a figure.

Her revolver was raised immediately, until she realized it wasn't moving. It looked like a person, but she couldn't really make out any features other than the chains holding it up. Her stomach churned. She'd never seen something like that before. Not wanting to see any more, Constance slammed the door shut, and stumbled away from it. What the hell was that doing in an old Church, she thought? It was at that moment that, behind her, she heard the sound of glass shattering, and the sound of scraping and footsteps once more...

Feeling a wave of nausea hit her, Constance turned around, seeing light flash across the service hall. Slowly, and quietly, she stepped over to the balcony that overlooked it, and, sure enough, one of the windows had been busted out in one corner, glass still falling and cracking against the floor. That thing was inside now; she guessed howling at the door all night wasn't its style. It didn't see her up there, but she got a good look at it, finally. Black skin, matted fur, and way too fucking skinny to be a wolf. It was disgusting, and seeing the way it dragged itself about gave her goosebumps. That thing wasn't natural, she knew that. It wasn't natural, it wasn't friendly, and it wasn't outside any more, and all three of those facts disagreed with her on a very personal level. Now, she realized, the church was no longer safe - at least not the first floor. Sure, the doors were sturdy, but the windows weren't. If that thing saw her, it would come, and she didn't want it to see her. There was exactly now one safe room left in that building, and it just had to be locked, to her dismay.

And then, she noticed the fucking key.

Nice and bright and key-shaped, sitting on top of one of the arms of the cross at the stage. She couldn't see it from below, but now that she was situated high up on the balcony, it was there. It was hidden in plain sight, and now it was guarded by a hellbeast. She couldn't call for help, since there were no phones in the building, and she didn't think that she could see in the storm well enough to try running again. Getting that key and maybe waiting the thing out seemed like her...well, not her best bet, but her only bet. That, or killing it. She brought her gun for a good reason. Only problem was, she wasn't very confident in her accuracy, and she didn't feel like getting closer to try it. No, she though. She needed to sneak by it, or maybe distract it.

Maybe - and the though disgusted her - but maybe she'd be able to distract it with a piece from what she could only imagine to be its gory pile...or, at least she sort of hoped that the mess in that corpse room belonged to it, and not something else in the church. She silently thanked God for her having worn gloves, swallowed her disgust, and silently stepped away from the balcony, turning back to that sick, red room behind her.

Below her, the hellbeast lurked, its bony limbs scraping the floor, and bloody snout sniffing the air for prey. Milky white eyes moved side to side, and scarred ear-holes listened for movement. It was on the prowl for the intruder that had disturbed it, and it wasn't likely to stop any time soon. It was ready to find and pounce on its prey, and its jagged claws were ready to sink into them...

Constance had no intention of letting it get its way, however. After disappearing into the room for but a moment, the woman found herself silently descending the stairs, bone in hand. She hit the floor, and practically tip-toed into the hall. She hoped that her plan would work...

She pressed her back to the wall, took a deep breath, and then chucked the bone down the opposite end of the hallway, wincing as it hit and bounced off of the floor with a loud thud. In the service hall, feet began to rapidly pound, and a hair-raising monster howl assaulted her ears. Constance stifled a yelp and clutched her revolver tight, preparing for the worst as her stalker barrelled towards the open doorway. Suddenly, the large figure lept past her, sliding on the floor before its claws caught and stuck into the wood, and making a mad dash down the hallway where she'd throne the bone. With her plan working smoothly, and her heart pounding loud enough for her to hear it, Constance began to quickly creep into the hall, going straight for the large cross and the podium, praying that she'd have the monster distracted long enough for it to not some back. Her feet hit the stage, and Constance stowed her gun, needing both hands to gently pick up the podium and reposition it close to the wall, taking great care not to make it bump or fall too hard onto anything. In a blur, she was stepping up onto the thing, one hand firm on the wall to hold steady, and the other desperately swiping at the arms of the cross, hoping to grab ahold of that key. Down the hall, another howl shrieked, making her tense up. She moved her hand, and felt nothing. Her fingers probed, and caught dust and air, and then - there it was! She felt cool metal, and quickly grabbed the key, leaning over to one side to reach the small item, but she was a little too far over for her own good. Her weight shifted, and so did the podium, she realized, the wooden stand slowly tipping over. In a panic, Constance gripped the arm of the large cross, trying to save herself, but the podium still fell over with a loud bang - as did the cross, which suddenly collapsed thanks to the woman's weight. Constance, the podium, and the very large crucifix all came tumbling to the ground, and Constance was left dazed as the air was forcefully expelled from her, landing square on her back in the middle of the stage.

Constance cursed and flopped over, gasping for air. Down the hall, the sound of running kicked back up. Wasting no time, Constance reached for the key, which had fallen a few feet away, and then drew her gun once more, dashing towards the exit. Ahead of her, the dog monster came charging; Constance didn't want to shoot again, but she didn't have much of a choice this time. Like the tunnel before, the woman fired off two shots, this time grazing the beast's shoulder, and causing the dog to fall over, screeching at her. It snapped at her leg, receiving a kick from Constance, who didn't even look back as she sprinted out of the service hall, and up the staircase once more. Recovering from its wounds, the beast made chase, only to receive a third shot, this time hitting it and causing the thing to shriek out again, this time in anger. Constance flew up the stairs and reached the door, key jamming into the lock, and the door flying open as she barrelled into it with her full weight. Constance grabbed the key and then slammed the door shut just as the dog reached the top again, and as it flailed and barked on the other side, she happily locked the door once more, and backed away, taking refuge in the small safe room.

She was trapped. She'd been trapped before, actually. Now, she was cornered for real, though. There in the safe room, the dog couldn't get her. The door was too sturdy, and this time, the window was too high. However, she also couldn't run. All she could do was sit and wait, in what she found to be a plain room, with little more than a desk, a lantern, and a single window to provide a view of the raging storm outside.

So, then...she would wait...





Hours had passed, it seemed. Hours, but the footsteps outside wouldn't end. The storm only got worse, and the sky only got darker. There, alone in the room, with only the light of the small lamp for comfort, Constance could only stay put and hope for things to clear up. If not, she would need to go out and confront the monster again, and considering it had shrugged off a bullet before, she wasn't too sure if that would even be a good idea. She was all nerves, sometimes pacing, and other times huddling against the wall and pulling her hair, peeking at the window and over her shoulder for any signs of danger. As time passed, however, she did calm down. The sounds of rain and thunder grew louder and louder, and the sounds of footsteps and scraping on the door were soon drowned out, and then...she fell asleep.

She wasn't too sure how, or when, but Constance felt at least a little better after resting for a bit. Her back still hurt a bit, but her head was a little bit more clear. The storm was still raging, and the scene outside of the window was pure black, though. She couldn't have been asleep for more than a few minutes, she thought, although it already felt like half the night was gone. For a while, she just sat there, staring out the window, looking for any sign of life outside of her little room. She heard thunder, but saw no lightning. She didn't think that was normal. There was little that she could do about that, however, except sigh and continue waiting. It was just all a waiting game. Eventually, the sun would rise, and the storm would clear, and Constance would hear the footsteps of her "friend" grow dull as it left, or she would find a way to get out from the window and give it the slip once again. She just needed to wait for the right moment...

And so Constance continued to pace. Time passed. She continued to sit and stare out of the window. More time passed. She pressed her ear to the door, and listened for any signs of movement. Still, time passed. Hours continued to pass, it seemed, and patience continued to run thin. When the sun didn't rise, Constance got worried. Restless and angry and paranoid as she was, she found her pacing and waiting to become more and more tiresome, until her nerves got the better of her. "Screw it.", She though, turning suddenly to approach the window again. Two stories wasn't that high up, right? All she had to do was crack open that window, and -

The moment that her hands touched the window, Constance froze. Damn it! It was too dark out to even see the ground, and the wind was rattling the window. She'd be more likely to kill herself that way than anything else, she thought. That left only one other way for her to escape, and she really didn't like the idea of going to kill that hellbeast. She'd brought plenty of spare ammunition, but that thing just freaked her out way too much. She knew that the moment she saw it, she'd be unloading every round she could into the thing. Still, if she kept waiting in the safe room, she'd never get anywhere.

Finally, she decided that no time was better than the present to make her move. Constance unlocked the door, and cracked it open, just a sliver. Nothing....nothing immediately jumped out at her. Her revolver was the first thing out of the door, but there was no monster waiting for her. Somehow, she thought, that was scarier than it still being there. Had it finally left, or was it just waiting somewhere else? Constance put one foot out the door, and then the other. Stepping out into the second floor again, one thing caught her attention. The lights were out now; most of them were out, any way, making the area much dimmer. Making her way downstairs, it seemed as though the first floor was also dimmer. The air was heavier, and cooler as well. The floor felt damper, and the walls seemed slicker. When Constance hit the first floor, the floor almost looked wet. She swallowed hard, eager to get out of the weird Church, and to escape from her stalker, glad that the front doors were just a few feet away.

When she passed the entrance to the service hall, the sight made her stumble back again. The fallen cross and podium were gone, and on the stage was a gruesome scene reminiscent of the gore pile she'd found upstairs. Blood and chains decorated the room - definitely not there before. It wasn't the room that she'd run from the hellbeast in earlier; the Church was all different, it seemed. It was changing, and she didn't want to see it change any more. She was getting out of there at that very moment. No more waiting. Constance didn't hesitate to approach the front door, quickly unlocking the double doors and pulling them open again, but unfortunately, she didn't have the chance to run out, because right on the other side of the door, was her wolfish friend.

It loomed, much taller than she'd realized, as it stood on its hind legs and peered down at her. Blood clung to its arm where she'd shot the beast earlier, and pale eyes glared at her. The stench of rot and death assaulted her, exuded from the monster itself, a shambling corpse-beast, a spindly claw jerking forward to grab her. Constance shrieked and fell back, spinning around on one foot and running. The creature's claw brushed her back, the brief contact scaring her even more, prompting her to run faster than she'd ever ran before. As she turned back and ran into the Church, the scenery changed once more. The floor squished underneath her, wood soft and rotted, and the walls fleshy. Eyes watched her, emerging from the walls, and windows blew out, the howl of wind and crashing of thunder almost deafening, drowning out the woman's screams. A gunshot rang out, a bullet whizzing past the pursuing monster. Constance ran down the hall, hoping to reach the end and make it out the back door, but the hall didn't seem to end. The light died out, blackness overtaking her, and the hellbeast's roars echoing behind her, but Constance continued to run, desperate for an escape. The sounds of squishing beneath her feet turned to splashing, and then...

bang

Constance hit something hard, head-on. The ground slipped out from underneath her.

The howling of wind began to die down. The barking and screaming of the monster faded. The darkness stayed. Constance stumbled to her feet, almost falling again. She accidentally kicked something, a metallic clang reverberating down the hall. Holding her head, she continued to walk, almost delirious in her panic. Every other noise had stopped except for the splashing beneath her feet. Ahead, she saw a dim light - something, at least, to move towards. Constance clutched her revolver and moved forward, taking a deep, unsteady breath with each step as she walked closer to the light. She winced, but as she walked ahead, she saw the light bend. Shapes began to form - walls, again, but...different from what she was used to. Stone and metal surrounded her. Her heels clicked on stone pavement instead of damp wood. She held in her breath, hesitant to continue. Behind her, though...she didn't know what would happen if she tried to go back. With what had been behind her moments before...

Constance exhaled. She only had one way to go that didn't seem to immediately lead to death. She had no idea what was happening, or why, or where she even was. She just hoped that she would get out of it safe and sound.





Seeds of Anxiety
Constance Fitzgerald


She was scared and confused; the woman stumbled from the alleyway, finding herself not outside of the Old Faircliff Church, but in a city. It wasn't Faircliff, either. For a moment, she thought it was, due to her emerging outside of a warehouse - the docks of Faircliff had a few small warehouses like it for Fishermen and shipping companies to use. None of the buildings seemed to match the docks though, and besides, the docks were nowhere near the Old Church. Where the hell was she? Constance back up, back into the alley, and looked around, paranoid as she was. Was there even anyone around? Was she safe, or in danger? She needed to keep her wits about her, and be prepared for anything. She had to make sure that she was, at the very least, no longer in danger, and then she'd need to find a damn phone booth and call someone, or figure out where the hell she'd ended up, and what the deal was with that cursed Church.

So then...where did she start?
Last edited by Rostavykhan on Tue Feb 18, 2020 4:26 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Rostavykhan
Minister
 
Posts: 2184
Founded: Sep 30, 2017
Corrupt Dictatorship

Postby Rostavykhan » Tue Feb 18, 2020 3:01 pm

Written with TJA*

The Great Wizarding Rebellion
Miria (And Lee)


Lee heard the pipes and panelling move and instinctively jumped away from it. He then located Miria easily enough, but she was obviously terrified. He could get close to her and heal her in two ways. One, move quickly in and back out, or, two, calm her slowly so he can heal her more easily. He made the rational choice of calming her first. He crouched down to make himself seem less frightening and moved slowly towards her so as to not scare her. "Hey, it's okay. It's fine. The crash is mostly over, and you're obviously hurt. If you want me to heal you, you're going to have to let me come close." He spoke in soothing, calm tones. He was glad he had remembered what his animal-loving friend had told him when confronted with a scared animal. And most people were animals, with deeply rooted instincts that came into play during traumatic events. Except AIs, since they were inorganic and artificial. "It's okay, it's okay." He extended his hand out, palm up to show that he meant no harm.

The boy's words seemingly reached the smaller girl's ears, but she was still quite frightened and wound up. Her head snapped in his direction, and then her entire body. She was still stumbling away, but walking backwards now, keeping her front facing towards him. She hissed, and arched her back slightly, but seemed to wince a little, clutching her ribs harder. Her eyes remained wide open, but her pupils narrowed, even more than usual, into narrow slits.

As she backed up, something caught her leg and caused her to stumble - her backpack - the girl falling and quickly hopping onto all fours, scurrying back again and digging her heels in. She wasn't outright attacking, at least, but she was still very defensive, and though the words that Lee spoke were registering in her head, her nerves were still wound up, and her apparent blindness without her glasses left her rather distressed as she attempted to make out the shapes in front of her. Finally, after backing up a few feet, Miria stopped, and allowed Lee to come a bit closer, although she was still very tense.

He continued towards her, his palm still outstretched towards her. He spotted her glasses, and levitated it into his outstretched hand. "Hey, here's your glasses. You probably need them to see, right? Well, here they are."

Silence. Red eyes stares back at the vague shape of the boy, catching a mild shimmer somewhere in the blur of colours before her. One hand reached out slowly, fingers outstretched. Her index finger brushed the rim of her spectacles. Her thumb prodded one of the lenses. Her gaze shot back to the Man-Blur, and then back to her hand. She was quick to snatch the glasses out of the air, slipping them on. Her eyes twitched again, and Miria began to blink rapidly, readjusting to her normal sight. Blurs became shapes, as the world returned to her. Once more, she looked at Lee, body still tense, but eyes relaxing now, as her pupils returned to their normal size. She looked nervous, biting her lip, a few of her fangs sticking out, but no longer seeming threatening. Finally realizing who it was in front of her, Miria felt a little...awkward. Her heart was still pounding, but she wasn't as on-edge as before. Really, losing her glasses was what had set her off so badly. Without her glasses, she was screwed.

Lee smiled warmly. The tactics were working. "Okay, now since you've calmed down a little, would you let me heal you? The magic will require physical contact, but only as much as me putting my hand on your forearm, for example." He was careful to phrase it so it was in no way sexual. His mind was almost always in the gutter, so he was careful to phrase his words carefully because of that.

Miria rubbed her chest a little and shivered. The pain wasn't sharp - very dull, but very strong. It felt like half her body was one big bruise. Deciding it better to not deal with that sort of pain, and to spare herself having to figure out just how bad the bruising was, the held out her free arm again, hand balled into a fist. She tugged her sleeve up a bit, although her forearm was still covered in the tight wraps that she always seemed to wear.

Taking this as an invitation to heal her, he tentatively put his hand on her forearm. Then he spoke one word that was infused with power and magic. "Heal." Soft golden light emanated from him like before, and the magic entered Miria's body. The bruising from the crash vanished as well as any small scars she may have had. The magic also stabilized her emotions, reducing her fear significantly, which would allow her to think more clearly. "I should also mention that this spell helps with emotions in great abundance that are generally regarded as negative. It probably made your fear decrease.

Miria didn't feel as bad any more. Now, however, she felt paranoid...well, more like suspicious. Her eyes were narrowed - not just her pupils, the girl staring at Lee for a moment. She felt weird about being healed, buuuut...well, he'd helped her. She just wasn't used to being the one having magic used on her. Natural Magic Users were an oddity to her, and she lived with one back home! At any rate, she wasn't hurt any more, and that was good. "Thanks.", She replied, slowly moving to get up again, and reaching for her hefty rucksack. "I guess that comes in handy, huh?"
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Aedroxus
Civil Servant
 
Posts: 8
Founded: Jan 25, 2020
Ex-Nation

Postby Aedroxus » Tue Feb 18, 2020 6:25 pm

Tides of Change
Kabal

Tath listens to the response carefully, his fingers to his chin as he does so. So far it seemed as if these people were going to prove harmless, but he still needed to be careful. He was out of his element here, with no other Tenno around to call for backup should he need it. One wrong move, one misplaced trust and it could be the end of him. Or maybe I'm just being overly paranoid? He thought as he responded to Wilson. "Just Tath is fine, thank you. My main engines are offline and I'm running on thrusters only. My vessel also has an advanced foundry matrix that I use to create material that is currently offline, though I don't know what sort of expertise you'd have with that. My ship uses an oxygen atmosphere, and I do have artificial gravity. As for my technology, my vessel uses a blend of mechanical and biological systems to operate. Again, I don't know if you have any experience with that sort of tech."

At this point, Ordis temporarily cuts the transmission and pipes up: "Operator, I think you should know that I am currently in the process of handling some of the repairs, and while I would not be against some outside assistance, I am concerned that they may attempt to -snnnNeak around and put their fIltHY handS on mYYYyyyy- go where they shouldn't. Are you sure it is wise to trust them?" Tath nods. "Honestly, Ordis, I don't know. But we don't have many options out here, and we only have so many resources to work with for repairs. The more we have to use ourselves, the less we have later." He said. "Yes, of course. If the Operator thinks that this is the best course of action, I will -b-b-begrudGinglyyyyYYYY- defer to your wisdom." Ordis replies.

Tath glances at Umbra, who looks back at him. "Don't worry, we'll keep an eye on them." He said, prompting the Warframe to nod, the eye on the right side of his face disappearing as his helmet reforms itself. "Put me back on." There is a beep, then Tath speaks again: "I belong to an organization called the Tenno, but I doubt you could get in touch with them, as they're currently millions of light years away... and also they probably don't exist yet..." Tath shakes his head, still in disbelief of the situation. He collects himself, and then speaks again. "Now that that is out of the way, might I ask who you might be? Also, I would like to make something abundantly clear: I appreciate your willingness to help, but you'll forgive me if I'm a bit cautious. I must warn you that if I suspect any sort of foul play from you, I will defend myself."

Ordis then abruptly speaks over the line: "yEah, show em wHo'S bOoOooOsssssSsS- I am sorry, Operator, I misspoke..." Tath holds in a sigh, and simply says: "It's alright, Ordis." He then patiently awaits a response.
Last edited by Aedroxus on Tue Feb 18, 2020 6:27 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Petrokovia
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Posts: 7678
Founded: Jul 07, 2014
Scandinavian Liberal Paradise

Postby Petrokovia » Wed Feb 19, 2020 8:39 pm

Prelude


25 years ago

A massive, sprawling city filled with parks, trees, rooftop greenhouses, and millions of people went about their day, the city alive with the sounds of trolleys, buses, music, and chatter. The population was primarily composed of women; mostly humans, along with androids. A modestly dressed woman with long, black hair made her way down the wide concrete path winding through central park, her almost identical six year old daughter in tow.

As the two approached a bench in the shade of a tree, they were stopped by a friendly call.

"Oh, Valerie!" another woman called out.

The dark-haired woman spun around with a smile.
"Hey, Jess."

The shorter woman turned to her own kid-a six year old girl with wavy brown hair who seemed to have a lot to say at exactly this moment-and nodded.
"Yes, you two can go, but don't wander too far."
"Stay within earshot." Valerie added.

The two kids nodded, and promptly ran off. Jess sighed as she sat next to Valerie on the park bench.
"Valerie Junior's growing up nice and strong, just like her mom." she teased with a nudge to the arm.

Valerie smiled.
"Thank you! Ovelia looks good, too! How are her lessons coming along?"

"Oh, wonderfully! They say she's pretty gifted."

The two looked over to the children; Ovelia held a finger up, showing her friend as she produced a tiny, green electric spark. It grew slowly, forming a small glowing ball, energy arcing off of it. When the ball was about the size of a golf ball, Jess stood up and called to her daughter.
"Ovelia, honey, careful!"

Music

Ovelia giggled, letting the energy fade and dissipate. Her mom smiled, but her joy was quickly interrupted by a loud screeching in the sky. Instantly, the park erupted in terror as a massive, glowing, flying alien creature streaked quickly through the upper atmosphere. The spindly, eight-limbed creature's nearly six kilometer wide arms spread out, casting shadows on the ground as the terror eclipsed the sun, its massive branches etching a black, buglike pattern against the star.

Time passed slowly for Jess and Valerie. Jess and Valerie rushed towards their children, as the strange creature glowed brighter in the sky; before they could reach their children, the sky flashed pure white forever in all directions; not a single scream was heard before the city was devastated by a massive shockwave. Travelling from directly below the monster in the sky, the blast shredded skyscrapers, shattered monuments, ripped and tore roads, and vaporized all organic material-plants, animals, people-for five miles in every direction. By the time the smoke cleared, the normally clear, blue sky had turned a hellish, dark shade of red, the city turned to a flat disk of ash. Massive black clouds billowed overhead as it slowly rained soot on the former hub of civilization.

In the ruins of central park, the ground cracked with green energy, the several feet of ash swirling into a massive black cloud that circled the park, rapidly gaining speed. Within, little Valerie faded in and out of consciousness; Ovelia was hunched over her, a translucent green bubble around them. Tears streamed down Ovelia's cheeks as she very slowly stood up, fighting excruciating pain. She tried to lift Valerie, but every muscle in her body stung sharply, and the little girl collapsed to the ground.

Breathing heavily between sobs, Ovelia struggled to sit up again, kneeling. She looked up at the glowing beast in the sky as it began charging again. The psychic girl let out a cry of despair, the ash clouds swirling ever faster.

A deafening roar filled the air as a 946 meter long space cruiser made reentry. The rectangular, modular ship was covered with massive gun turrets housing rail guns with an impressive 11 meter bore, though most of this space was for batteries, electromagnets, and coolant systems; the shell itself was three meters wide and ten meters tall. The cannons fired volley after volley, sending two dozen massive shells, each coated with what appeared to be glowing green plasma that bombarded the glowing specter, chasing it into the red sky above.

Ovelia watched as the space arachnid left, turning her gaze slowly to the empty, flat horizon.


Tides of Change


A tall woman in a crisp military uniform stood in the center of a busy war room. Her long, wavy brown hair draped over her dark green uniform coat, and a thin metal headband with a red star sat atop her head. A mid-calf length waist cape partially obscured her legs, and her pants were tucked into black calf height boots.

Her uniform was one in 22 billion in the Verenusian People's Grand Militia, except for two things; a maroon armband with silver trim on her left arm, which denoted her role as a Medium, and her shoulder boards, which held the position of Fleet Admiral. A silver double aiguillette on her right side denoted her position as the elected leader of the fleets of the 14 systems of the VPU, and a circular patch above the arm band on her left arm held the symbol for the VPGM-a silver shield with a golden sun rising from the bottom, casting rays of light.

The war room was the command and control room of the Admiral's flagship, the PGM Daeqoria. Personnel chattered on headsets and worked away at various stations, boards, computers, and screens, giving a strangely warm atmosphere to the dimly lit room. The woman at the war table in the center looked over as someone entered the CIC; a tall, slim woman with long, straight black hair walked towards the table.
"Morning, Ovelia!"

The brunette smiled and gave a nod.
"Heya, Val."

Ovelia handed Valerie a clipboard, the latter flipping through several pages inquisitively.
"New directive?"

"Yep." the admiral nodded. "There's reports of strange energy readings a little outside the Belestrovo system, so we're going to check it out."

The command room bustled with increased activity as Ovelia turned to navigation.
"Plot the jump."
"All hands prepare for hyperlight jump, all hands prepare for hyperlight jump."
"Plotting jump. Sending coordinates to navicomputer."
"Fleet reporting in."
"Calling combat air patrol to land, calling combat air patrol to land."
"Aescerebi have made their calculations."
"All fighters aboard."
"FTL drive spooling... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... FTL spooling complete."
"All ships report ready for hyperlight jump."
"Jumping on CO's mark."

Ovelia matched the navigational officer's gaze, and nodded.
"Mark."

Suddenly, the Daeqoria vanished in a quick flash, followed by dozens more.


Kabal, Star Wars Galaxy (non-MUDP)

Dozens of angular, box-like ships blinked into existence in formation in far orbit of the planet; a fleet made up of 3 corvettes, 35 frigates, 20 cruisers, 10 battleships, 2 superbattleships, 30 long range spearships, and 45 various auxiliary vessels. Led by the flagship PGM Daeqoria, the fleet totaled 145 ships.

"Jump complete..." the navigational officer stammered nervously. "We... seem to have lost course. We are in an unknown realm."
"Contacts. Several ships are also currently in orbit of this planet, albeit in closer paths than us."

Ovelia looked at the map displaying the surrounding area.
"Deploy the CAP, and hail the other ships on an open frequency. Patch me through."

A number of ships deployed handfuls of starfighters, which flew in defensive positions around the fleet and conducted basic patrols.

Ovelia turned to a large flatscreen mounted on the wall at the front of the CIC, and waited as "Unidentified Contact" was written in bold letters across the screen.
"Hark, all vessels. This is Fleet Admiral Ovelia Sagalyn of the Verenusian People's Grand Militia, diplomatic representative of the Verenusian People's Union, commanding officer of the Daeqoria, and 8th order Medium of the Guard of Vesper. My fleet arrived here as a result of a navigational error. Who is the commanding officer? And may I ask where 'here' is?"

Ovelia had heard tales of ships being sucked to different universes in the past.
But that was three hundred years ago... she thought to herself. And it was almost enitrely within MUDP territory, not Verenusia...

The admiral glanced to Valerie briefly. Neither said a word, but both knew that there was a distinct possibility that they were no longer in their own universe.
Last edited by Petrokovia on Tue Jan 19, 2021 4:19 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Communist from Philly living with multiplicity; We literally are Petrokovia. We are very spiritual adherents to our religion.
Pro: AES, Juche, communism, armed revolution, God (Mikotorma), reappropriating monarchical terms for socialist things (what's in a name?), the ethereal spaceship polycule sent by Allah to guide us, freedom of expression and religion
Anti: Fascism, absolute monarchy, capitalism, imperialism, Demiurge/Saklas, bigotry of any kind
Note: I do not use NS Stats, NS Tracker, etc. I only use my own factbooks and written information; The main canon used is the Democratic Socialist Vesperist Realms of Petrokovia (DSVRP)
من خلال الشدائد وسفك الدماء إلى المجد نسير بنور قلوبنا على طريق ميكوتورماه
National Anthem: Our Country!
National Religion: Vesperism

*Communist and Proud!*

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Demincia
Minister
 
Posts: 2326
Founded: Jul 08, 2010
Democratic Socialists

Postby Demincia » Thu Feb 20, 2020 5:07 am

Seeds of Anxiety
Lludw Cigfrain, Cymru
Rosanna Dawson


Rosanna knelt down by one of the bodies that had been torn apart. She sniffed a few times, the scent of death all over the scene. If I didn't know where you were, I might be tempted to think you had something to do with this. she thought seeing teeth marks on the bone.

<I'm insulted that you'd think that. I wouldn't leave so much out to rot. Waste not, want not.> replied the demon.

"Either something small, or something that wasn't particularly hungry." she said aloud. "Doesn't look like a scavenger, so whatever it was that decided to have a snack, it wasn't too bothered by all of the chaos going around. Trained maybe? Or not afraid of wading through gunfire or flames for a meal."

She looked at the skeletons, but before she could get too involved in the discussion her keen hearing picked up movement behind them. "We've got company, shape up." she said spinning around and drawing her service pistol. Her ears and nose twitched again, letting the enhanced senses of the wolf work to find what was out there.

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Naval Monte
Postmaster-General
 
Posts: 13807
Founded: Sep 04, 2014
Civil Rights Lovefest

Postby Naval Monte » Thu Feb 20, 2020 5:25 pm

Tides of Change
Kabal


Wilson thought on the option presented to him. On one hand helping the stranded interdimmie was the right thing to do and chances are they might be rewarded for it. Yet they still don't know much of this Tath character. He might not be as harmless as he looks.

This Tath might have traps on board his ship and he might either capture the engineering team to be hold as a ransom for their tech or credits or he will kill them for fun or try to flee so he can have them as slaves. With their close proximity to the Outer Rim they had plenty of experience with pirates, slavers, and serial killers. More importantly they had to be careful on ensuring their technology never got out and fell to the wrong hands.

"Now I'm just being paranoid. This guy is new to this galaxy. I doubt he is anything like the Hutt or the Zygerrians. I hope so anyway." Wilson thought.

When Tath explained who he worked for Wilson would see the holo image on their database show no match with Tenno. "He was right on that. First time both me and our archive heard of this Tenno." Wilson would soon hear Tath wanting answers on who they are as well as his declaration on defending themselves if they try to do anything funny with him. 

"So I wasn't the only one being paranoid about this huh? At least he isn't gullible to trust everyone he meets. That will save his ass out on the Outer Rim." while that was reassuring what wasn't was the man's commit on attacking them if he suspects them of being a threat. Could he risk the engineers life if he mistook their actions for a threat? 

Wilson sighed heavily. He'll have to hope that things go well on that ship.

"The feeling is mutual Tath. If you do something to our people we will fire our MAC guns and Turbolasers on your ship. As for who we are well..." Wilson was interrupted as Doug would cut in on following the fighters to the hanger.

"Sorry for this Tath. Yes, follow them to the hanger. The radiation scrubbers probably made the radiation levels tolerable now." The captain would turn his attention back to Tath. "Now, where was I?" 

Before he can speak again his ship AI and VIs began to sound off alarms of a massive rift activity. "Should have seen this coming. Once one rift opens many more will come" he thought as he prepared for the newest ship to appear over Kabal. What he got was beyond what he expected.

Wilson would see a large fleet of a variety of types of warships appear over Kabal! He saw ships that if he had to guess probably belong to the frigate and cruiser tonnage ranges. But what caught his eyes were the massive ships that fell not only into the tonnage range of Star Destroyers but into full blown Star Dreadnaughts! The auxiliary crafts that followed after the mighty Titans of starship engineering were mostly ignored by the organic crew but the digital crew members took note of their presence and made sure everyone was aware of them.

Another interesting note was that the fleet mirrored their own designed philosophy. Favoring ships that were utilitarian in nature and pragmatic in design. He wouldn't be surprised if they were also using modular parts and systems. A part of him wonder just how similar their ships was to them 

But the other part of his mind saw the fleet presented to Wilson was a full on invasion fleet; the exact scenario he dreaded would occur. Wilson's own meager forces can do nothing against warships of such magnitude or numbers. The Dreadnaught-Classes are workhorses but they are old ships. They might destroy one of the Star Destroyers if a pair or trio attacked it together, but with their fleet surrounded they will surely lose the engagement quickly.

Just as Wilson thought to return the transport back to the fleet he would hear a new broadcast come from the fleet.

"Hark, all vessels. This is Fleet Admiral Ovelia Sagalyn of the Verenusian People's Grand Militia, diplomatic representative of the Verenusian People's Union, commanding officer of the Daeqoria, and 8th order Medium of the Guard of Vesper. My fleet arrived here as a result of a navigational error. Who is the commanding officer? And may I ask where 'here' is?"

Verenusian? Looking through his AR contacts and the neural link he has with the ship computers he found no link to this Verenusian People's Union? Could it be that like Doug and Tath this fleet was yank from their homes unexpectedly and brought to here?

"Captain we're getting transmission from Kabal. The natives are getting restless on a massive fleet over their world." Wilson wasn't surprised to hear the news. His people would feel the same if they saw a massive fleet over any of their worlds. If this was Zakuul the fleet would have a defense fleet and orbital defense stations aimed at them along with surface to orbit MAC guns and Ion cannons.

Unfortunately, Kabal did not have the funds or materials to have such a robust military force. Their services were often requested by worlds like them to aid them on fending off pirates and other criminal elements in the Outer Rim.

Right now he has a world that can erupt in panic at any moment. He had to quell a potential riot before it was too late. "Patch the Kabalans in. I want them to be involved in this." The officers type on the commands of their keyboard with speed and efficiency that it borders on being superhuman, almost eerily like a droid.

"Done sir. They are now in." Wilson can hear chatter on the lines as various voices asked for why they are multiple unauthorized ships over their planet. "Don't worry. We got the situation under control." 

Wilson would straighten himself. Now it was time to introduce himself and his people to these strangers.

"I am captain Wade Wilson of the Vindicator, I'm a part of the Colonial Expeditionary Defense Fleet. I come from The United Repatriate Colonies of Concordia, but Concordia is acceptable. You all are over the world of Kabal, in the Mayagil Sector, and on the Sharlissian Trade Corridor on the Outer Rim of the galaxy. My people are here because we were called to aid the people of Kabal because they are suffering from food shortages. We request you do not engage in hostilities against them or us. We do not wish to fight a ceaseless battle." 

Wilson told the rest of the ships. Now he just hopes they will listen to him.
Naval Monte- The Mediterranean crossroads of mind-controlling conspiracies, twisted dimensions, inhuman depravity, questionable science, unholy commerce, heretical faiths, absurd politics, and cutting-edge art.

Make wonderful memories here, in Naval Monte.

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Wysten
Minister
 
Posts: 2604
Founded: Apr 29, 2017
Inoffensive Centrist Democracy

Postby Wysten » Thu Feb 20, 2020 8:35 pm

Kelli Ivananko
Seeds of Anxiety

Prologue

The cold winter air whipped across Kelli's body as she stood overlooking what used to be Donetsk Airport as the distant sounds of battle and the howling of the wind were the only sounds carrying across the rubble-strewn area. Taking a look through her Draganov SVD Kelli scanned the area for any Ukranian forces when suddenly she felt a jolt. Turning around with a spin she felt the roof under start to give way as she saw in the distance long fireball had burned the lower parts of the building. The already battered structure gave out and the roof fell at an angle. Being slammed down Kelli cursed in pain as the bandages on her burns tore open as she slid off the roof with some rubble and hit the ground with a snap and her vision shifted to a total blackness.

Slowly waking up to the sound of the cars passing by and the feeling of rain on her exposed burns. Her single eye scanned her entire body and saw that her gear and uniform was torn and bloody. Her rifle was gone though she summoned a small AK-74u and pulled the charging handle back. Trying to stand up she fell back down onto the pavement as pain ran up both her legs from the fall. In frustration, she tossed her helmet off and dragged herself to a wall. Looking over the wall Kelli saw a group of agents standing outside of some warehouse. Realizing that she probably couldn't run Kelli decided to fight as she raised the carbine and let out a full burst towards the group of agents.
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Skylus
Negotiator
 
Posts: 6510
Founded: Oct 25, 2016
Inoffensive Centrist Democracy

Too many names, collab between everyone in TGWR - part 1

Postby Skylus » Fri Feb 21, 2020 8:08 pm

The Great Wizarding Rebellion
Inside the wreck of the Flying Krock, WW Link & Kiara


Blood and sweat. The smell of ground metal: powdered steel. Burning rubber, broken stops. Sulphur and shredded charcoal. The air was sweet with the smell of charred flesh, not dissimilar in texture or aroma to sugar burnt in a pan. Saccharine and sickening. Hot and moist. Kiara coughed once, twice, then twitched her fingers, grasping at bundles of severed wires and severed tendons. Her abdomen tensed in forewarning right before it heaved and she hurled, spewing a deluge of blue. The light in the depths of the crashed ship was dim but not nonexistent - it was shallowly buried and some of its interior lights still flickered, railing against the dark as the vessel's systems - like organs - failed one by one.

The air was heavy with the harsh, heady stench of burning lead and burnt fuses. As she tried to manoeuvre about in her metal coffin, trying to ascertain her position, little chunks of split ceramic rattled about beneath her knees and fists; burst transistors, fuses and heat shields. There was a dull throb in her torso. She couldn't move her chest. Why was that? Her palms roved over her body in an attempt to find the anchor point. She felt a cool, slick cylinder of corded iron around her waist. A length of structural rebar, no doubt originally intended to protect an important electrical installation of some kind. Well, that had turned out rather well, hadn't it? She tried to laugh but only spat out wads of brackish fluid.

She brushed her hair out of her eyes: it clung to her hand and hung heavy on her scalp, soaked in warm effluent. The insides of her cheeks were plastered with a musky, rusty tasting substance. She tried to get up but again, found herself held down by the bar near her waist. With an understated dread she grasped it and followed it downward with one finger. The digit migrated off of the cable and onto her stomach's skin.
She had not drawn breath since she had woken up; she felt woozy and lost. How much time had passed? The crackling of distant fires, the muffled groaning of twisted metal... it felt like she was hearing the dying calls of a harpooned whale, its organs mulched and its muscles mixed in with shattered fragments of bone.

Yet, when she tried to suck in a mouthful of air - despite knowing that it would be laden with laceratory particulate and toxins - she only forced a lump of slime and dust which had been caught within it into her lungs. She choked, hacked, then erupted, spitting it out like a bullet. It banged against whatever lay in front of her head and showered her in wet debris. Well, at least she had worked out that she was lying on her back.
She grasped the length of rebar, palms slipping and knuckles numb. She gave a tremendous pull, twisting her body one way and the bar in the other. With a tremendous crack, her ribs gave way and her lung was utterly torn out, leaving a hollow cavity in place of the left side of her torso. The bar, too, shrieked and gave way, shedding layers upon layers of gathered filth that'd clung to the sticky grime that her body had lathered upon it.

Blood. That was the word. Blood. There was blood in her mouth, blood on the bar, blood all around her. She was stewing in a crucible of metal, fire and blood.
Her hands were covered in deep crevasses and gouges. Her flesh had parted in a thousand places. Did she smell burning meat? That sickly sweet - sometimes bitter - smell? A thousand minor sherds of loose metal dislodged from within her flesh and within her bones as she moved, struggling to make room for herself. There was an immense, triangular pressure on her shins. She shoved aside a sheet of metal that'd been laying on her chest without thinking and immediately, two cracks rang out. Her legs split as the beam which had been laying upon them found itself unsupported. It fell an inch, met her bones, and then kept going.

Darkness and heavy breathing. A loud and involuntary gasp, halfway to being a sob. Alone in the dark, unable to move and unable to see, panic began to set in. The air and her moist clothes clung to her like leeches. An oppressive warmth built and built as fires and molten metal spread throughout the ship; one yearning upward and the other seeping downward. She heard the pitter patter of water and blood flowing downward and dripping onto hard surfaces, creating hollow plopping noises.

She should've been able to hear the slightest and quietest things: the sound of water condensing on hot panelling or the distant shouts of trapped and wounded men. But instead, all she could hear was the roar of blood and synovium inside her ears and at the base of her spine. When she breathed in, the gap in her left lung made a sloppy whistling noise. She wanted someone to find her, anyone. She just wanted to hear someone speak, to see someone's face. She wanted help. Help...

A minute passed. Then five. Then many, many more and yet still nothing happened. She just lay there and languished, stewing in carnal pains. At least she had something to take her mind off of less pertinent, more cognitive sorrows, though.

It was only after a very long time - after her lungs had sealed themselves, after her legs had formed scabs to hold in the blood and after her breathing had cleared up - that she tried to move again. She tried to sit upright, pushing against whatever was above her head. There was a loud groan and then a distant, tremendous clamour. But, at last, the ceiling parted and allowed her to emerge from her would've-been tomb. The room which she had been in before the crash had caved in and the roof had fallen down. Now that she had pushed it away she could see that she had been buried under a layer of broken scrap inside an enormous cavity within the ship. Above her, for almost twenty metres, was an uninterrupted cavern lined with molten metal and broken electronics; at least seven different rooms' floors and rooves had been destroyed in the process of the cave's formation.

She took a step forward with fresh skeletal legs from which little ribbons of cartilage and gore hung, treading over shattered plastic tables and heavy had-been doors. As her foot fell she heard a slosh, then felt a coolness envelop her ankles. She looked down to find that there was water - fresh water - around her leg, and it was rising.

Her blood was washed away by the current, dispersing throughout it. She immediately fell down to the ground, pulling up sheets of metal stained with her blood and throwing them up into the higher parts of the ship. However, try as she might, she could not remove them all from the water. The lake gobbled up her blood and carried it away, turning the clear water a rich, dark blue.
Just a drop of her blood dispersed within a cubic metre of water could debilitate a man for a day - drive him to slaughter his children and carve geometric patterns into his eyes with a sewing needle - she'd seen it happen. She had lost litres upon litres of the stuff: how intensely concentrated would it be around the ship? She didn't want to think about it.

But there was still the matter of her broken body and its exposed flesh. Her vision was blurry - her eyes had been perforated by little motes of broken glass, the remnants of her contact lenses. It didn't hurt but the thought of that being the case was certainly disquieting, even to her - a member of a species who could recover from almost any imaginable wound. She needed to bind her wounds; clean and cover herself up.

There was no shortage of material to do that with; bodies were strewn about in the rubble. Discontiguous lumps of flesh wrapped in kevlar and cloth hung from hooks and lay between sheets of iron, squeezed to a fine pulp. She wanted nothing more than to leave them alone. The smell alone was revolting for how mundane it seemed: it all just smelled like raw pork. She could almost imagine herself frying the bodies up in a pan and serving them with cornbread. Perhaps that was a problem with her mind and not with her circumstances, though. She reached out toward a husked out corpse - probably once an auror - and peeled off a long strip of black cloth around as large as a shirt from it. She could no longer identify which part of the man's body the lump of meat had been, as it had been so thoroughly ground up that it resembled corded mincemeat more than anything else.

She wrapped her arms in strips of cloth, wound bandages around her legs, tied a blindfold about her eyes. But there was nothing to fill in the cracks in her lips, cheeks, jaw, teeth; those small abrasions could not be covered up without immobilizing herself. The answer to that quandry was once again simple and excruciatingly painful, albeit in a physical way rather than a psychological one,
There were fires all around the ship; pools of molten metal or broken, arcing electrical devices. She picked up a piece of plastic from the ground - the remains of a plastic drinking cup or a plate - and held it over the surface of an incandescent structural beam. As soon as it sagged she pressed it, hard, against her injuries. There was a searing noise, a scalding sensation. Her blood boiled and threatened to burst through the plastic barrier so she pinched the wound, forcing the blood out of its vicinity. It took all of her concentration just to suppress the urge to let go, to tear off the brand of molten plastic and throw it away. Tears streamed from her eyes and a sharp, prolonged hiss squeezed between her teeth. She plunged her head into the water at her feet - now at her knees - and heard a dull sizzle.

She should've been able to hold her breath for hours or more, but she couldn't help but heave and choke. She had to hold one hand over her mouth and nose just to keep herself from inhaling a lungful of contaminated brine. Although she had initially wanted to hold her head under the surface until the burning pain subsided, she was forced to emerge after just a few seconds, gasping for breath and spluttering. Finally, the agony dulled just enough for her to regain her faculties so she looked at her reflection, seeing that along the left side of her face there was now an ugly black scar of solid polyethylene.

That was just the first time that she had to perform the procedure. The next time was harder than the last, and the next even harder than that. She melted down whatever she could find - straws, book covers, lighting fixtures and other things - and used them like plaster. After the first three such operations she found that whenever she blinked or moved her mouth she could feel tiny tendrils of plastic - which had filled up the pores in her skin - digging into her flesh. After she filled in her arms her whole body began to feel crusty, like she was covered in flaking, dry mucus. When she was done she looked like a victim of a NAPALM attack, her many many injuries censored by massive black splotches. Every motion took a relative eternity and caused her an immense, unabating pain, but it was done. The world was safe from her.

She fell against a wall, breathing heavily, sucking in air and feeling her makeshift "bandages" jab at her raw flesh. Little macrodermal scales held each plastic scab in place, not allowing the barrier to fail. She had washed herself off thoroughly in a stagnant pool of water - so as to ensure that its contents didn't leak into the lake - but she knew that litres of it had already gotten out. She could've curled up into a ball and apologised forever for that - for existing and being so irresponsible as to bleed - but she quite simply didn't have the energy to. In fact, she had no energy for anything at all. The paralyzing agony that she'd felt was with her still, and all she wanted to do was sleep.
Meanwhile, somewhere near the front of the wrecked airship, Link had figured out that half of the ship had been buried underground, judging by the dirt pressing up against the windows and covering the metal plates floor in some cases.

He had passed what had looked like bodies of both Auror and Kremling, although he didn’t get close to investigate, understandably.

Now, he was in some open room, a ray of light shining down from somewhere above him.

’A way out? Has to be. I don’t see a ladder anywhere, but I suppose I don’t need one, do I?’ thought the Hylian as he took out the Hookshot and fired it upwards, the claw creating sparks as it sank into something metal. Link primed the Hookshot and then flew upwards, until he could barely see some sort of metal platform in front of him.

He swung forwards and detached the Hookshot from whatever it had latched onto, then landed on the platform and looked up to find a metal hatch about three feet above him.
’Great. Just have find a way to open it.’

The hatch flew off its rusted hinges onto the floor as Link leapt from a makeshift ladder and hit the door with the Hookshot claw, then fired it upwards and used it to fly upwards to the upper deck. From there, he landed safety on a walkway and looked around.

“Hello?” For a moment, he wondered if it was even worth calling out to anyone, but it wouldn’t hurt, would it?

His answer was a high pitched whine. An insect call, a guttural scrape. Kiara sang a Kalmite nursery rhyme, an old and wordless melody which would be called anything but by human ears. It was like the sound of every insect in a forest crying out at once, of wind over turbulent waters, of stones falling upon moist soil. Footfalls, wolf-cries, the growl of a far-off predator. The pitter patter of rain underlaid it all, the sound she'd last heard before leaving him. It was not a song, it was ambience. Discordant, ugly, sincere ambience.

As Link risked looking over the walkway railing, he began to hear something, some sort of noise, some sort of ambience, but yet it was something more.
...Singing? I’ve never heard anything like it before. I wonder what language it is.

The Hylian took a step forward, to his left, then heard an ominous creak and then leapt back as the walkway crashed to the floor below. Link stayed where he was for a few seconds, then used the Hookshot to get down from the remains of the walkway. From there, he set out to find the source of the singing, avoiding the water and instead traversing over hopefully solid ground/metal platforms.

Before he could move further into the ship a black silhouette bore down on him from the right, grabbing him and pulling him back in the direction that he came. The silhouette seemed utterly foreign to him at first, as it resembled a painted figurine which somebody had stripped of paint and covered in pieces of plasticine. But he could not forget that shock of white hair, nor those aqua-blue fringes. Kiara had a blindfold and her limbs were covered in strips of reclaimed cloth. However, beneath the rags he could see splotches of a black, tough substance which had seemingly bonded to her. "No!" She hissed, her high-pitched - and painfully loud - voice slowly adopting a more human cadence and timbre. "Don't go in there. The water, it's dangerous; you need to get out of here, get to the surface!"

Link lifted the Master Sword a bit in order to see better. “Kiara?” He stared at her for a moment in shock before he looked down at the water flowing past. “What do you mean, it’s dangerous?”
He then began to feel a sense of paranoia and impending doom a moment later and he moved his gaze from the - wait why was it blue - water to Kiara. “I...I can help you get out of here...”

"Close your eyes," she snapped. "I know the way out but for god's sake close your eyes and hold your hands over your ears."

Link silently wondered what he had gotten himself into as he debated not listening to Kiara and just trying to find the way out on his own, but something told him it would be worthwhile to listen to her.

He looked down at the sword in his hand before he put it away and deprimed the Hookshot and hooked it to his shield. “Alright. I guess we can leave...”
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VTtM: Madison Goodwill, Link (WW), Amaterasu, Alt. Future Link, Link (TP), Link (BotW) (I’m a Zelda fan okay)
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Skylus
Negotiator
 
Posts: 6510
Founded: Oct 25, 2016
Inoffensive Centrist Democracy

Collab part 2

Postby Skylus » Fri Feb 21, 2020 8:14 pm

The Great Wizarding Rebellion
Outside the wrecked airship; courtyard of Buckingham Palace


Madi appeared a few feet away from the group with a flash of light and a muted crack. She looked around for a second, then behind her. “Oh, hi. Everyone find each other? Yeah? Good. Listen I have something I need to talk to you about. I didn’t mean to leave like that, it just happened. I tried to keep the thing from crashing. Rouge spell hit the engines and...Well...”

Madi waved a hand towards the remnants of the airship. “That happened. And another thing. I talked to AEGIS. They said that in order to hopefully secure our safety, we had to be recaptured. And, well, I...kinda went ahead and told them to do that.”

Miria's pupils narrowed again; so much for being calmed down. "You're what!?", She hissed, slinking back behind Lee. "What is this treachery? Why get recaptured when we've nearly died trying to escape? I don't trust these....these...", She stammered, the girl beginning to grit her teeth. She fung her arms out. "These hyu-mans! You're vile governments and those AEGIS interlopers have tried to our heads since the moment we got back here! Why the hell should we trust what they say? This is....grrrraaaaaah!"

Miria screamed. She'd had enough. She flung her hands up into the air, as she began to pace about, tongue out, mimicking...Madi? "Nnnn! Oh, don't mind me, never mind the fact we just got exploded out of the air, but you know those shady Human soldiers and the magic-weilders who chased us down and are killing people, who we just all nearly died escaping from twice? Guess we'll just have to let them get us again this time because we're screwed otherwise, because yOu CaN tRuSt Us!". She yelled - followed by another "Nnnn!", no less. Her left arm swung back down violently, and it was almost a miracle it didn't hit and knock out Lee on the way down. Her right hand, however, was shaking violently, not so much adjusting Miria's glasses as it was swinging them up and down on her face, lest she actually use it to hit anyone. It was then that, just like in the infirmary, and in the vault before, a spark popped in one of her belt pouches, her crystal's black fire flaring up once more, the energy barely visible for a moment as it flared up and spat out of the sides of the top flap.

The air shimmered like quicksilver. The skies turned a richer blue than they'd ever been - a sickly, phlegmy blue - and a voice like a shrill whistle pierced Madi's ear. "You what?" It was not a charged question. Kiara stood on the lake's bank, a dozen layers of cloth hanging off of her and dirty black streaks of molten - the solidified - plastic lining her face like blood running down a beaten child's face. "Why? Why would you..." She flexed the fingers on her hand experimentally, feeling dollops of polystyrene and resin dig into her skin. Her macrodermis flared up for a moment, causing a dark shimmer to run along the length of her body. Her lips were taut and her eyebrows drawn in a line. The hair on her head darkened to a dull silvery colour. "That's..."
Her brow untensed. She stepped back, hand on her chest. "No, no! Not this soon. I can't-..." As she lost her composure her voice grew higher and faster. She babbled, almost unintelligible. "They're going to kill us, don't you understand? Some of us. Why would you do that? Why did you think you knew what was best for us? I don't- I don't want to be here. I can't do this, not... I can't. I'm sorry, I'm-" She swallowed hard. "We need to get out of here." She locked eyes with Link, Miria, the rest; she pleaded with her gaze, terrified and injured out of her wits.

As the group jeered and shouted in fury at Madison apparent betrayal at wanting to sell them to the same people they escaped from days ago none paid heed to the two yokais who overheard the confession. Than again, they were oddly silent over the whole ordeal.

Tenmza clinched his right hand into a fist, his nails digging into the crimson flesh of his palm and tearing through it easily, drawing out blood that dripped down. As the tengu shook in fear the Inugami gave the ghoul a scathing glare, just by his eyes and the snarl on his face it was obvious how much contempt he has for Madison for wanting to turn them over to AEGIS.

The Tengu threw his head back and screamed in fear as he thrust his wings high up to the heaven and began to flap them furiously, sending a powerful gale straight towards Madi. As the strong winds and clouds of dust distracted her she would see the tengu flying towards her until he was at her face. The tengu would pull back his left arm and spring it forward to deliver a powerful punch at her lower jaw. The force would be enoufh that if Madison was a regular human he would have shattered her lower jaw. But even still it would still make her feel great pain and leave disoriented.

"Damn you! Damn you for your betrayal you corpse eating witch! But most of all, damn you for proving my people right about your kind! You are all nothing but scum on the Earth!" He shouted at her. Pulling back his other arm and sending another punch, this time at her nose. As the ghoul stumbled back the tengu would take out his spear and before anyone can stop him would stab her on the chest with it.

"It should be you rotting away in a cell! Not us!" He yelled, hateful yellow eyes looking down at the ghoulish witch.

Naturally, some people fainted at the sight of the Tengu stabbing Madi, while others started to question if the Tengu had gone too far. Madi, however, was no longer human, but something else.

She was now a ghoul-bear. Bear-ghoul? It didn’t matter.

The creature reeled in pain and gave a short roar before scrabbling at the spear lodged in her chest, eyes bloodshot and cloudy.
She couldn’t speak, couldn’t defend herself, couldn’t apologize.
Her only focus right now was to get the spear out of her chest, nothing else.
Madi soon forgot anyone else was there besides the Tengu and simply continued trying to get the spear out. Her claws were bloodied and torn, more blood was running down her chest and falling to the grass, but she didn’t stop. Eventually, the creature gave up and went limp, the only thing keeping her upright was the spear. Her pained, distraught gaze met the Tengu’s hateful yellow eyes, but she didn’t look away.

Lee had been nearby in the ship piece scavenging for anything interesting or useful. He heard the angry voices outside and lifted his head a bit before turning back to what he was trying to open. Then he heard the roar. It was short and in pain. Lee immediately stopped what he was doing and rushed outside, using his telekinesis to speed him up. He burst outside and took in the situation. There was a bear with a spear sticking out of its chest with the tengu nearby, glaring hatefully at it. The others were nearby and Lee could sense some residual anger that had been mostly replaced with shock. Some had even fainted. Lee focused on the bear before muttering. "Observation." He only looked at the first few words before realizing that Madi, the ghoul-witch, had turned into a ghoul-bear. Lee threw himself up into the air and then down between Madi and the tengu. He would've broken his legs if he was a normal human. He didn't take the spear out of Madi's chest, though, because he had learned that it was best not to from the interent. "Okay, okay, what the hell is going on here?! And why does it seem like I'm the only one with a level head here?!" He had inadvertently blocked Madi from seeing the tengu.

Miria jumped back, shocked by the sudden violence; as angry as she had been, it seemed as though everyone else was angrier. Miria turned away, spotting Kiara, and shivered. She looked away again, not wanting to see her, only to find Madi being stabbed, eliciting a shriek from her.

Wait, Madi? Madi! Miria didn't know what to do. If they all started attacking Madi, then she would die, and then they would all be in trouble either way! "Stop!", Miria cried, reaching out, although it seemed to do little to calm anyone down. "Stop it!"

Her blood began to boil again, heart racing and legs shaking. She needed to help; she couldn't let more friends die from in-fighting. She had to do something. She didn't even think about what she was doing, only moving, trying to protect Madi and diffuse the situation. Before she knew it, Miria had jumped between Madi and the others, and then...she screamed.

"STOP!"
Snap; the crystal snapped. On her belt, Miria's corrupted soul stone shattered, as negative energy finally filled it to capacity. It was like a cannon going off, the sound pounding through the air around them. Black and green soul fire fanned out, before the flames dissipated, and...warped. In fact, everything began to warp. Finally, it seemed, that whatever had been contained in that stone was released, and it seemed to be disrupting reality around them. Flame turned to blight, tearing through time and space, as black squares blinked in and out of the space around them. Reality itself was "glitched", corrupting and uncorrupting, as Abyssal energy surged and cooked off in the matter of realspace, obliterating smaller particles and singing those it licked. Miria's shadow slowly began to tilt underneath her, moving on its own, the shadowy figure twisting and slowly roping itself around her, raising off of the ground in a billow of dark energy. It was still Miria, but it also wasn't - light sunk to its feet, the shadow growing darker as it rose to its own feet, its body wispy and ethereal in comparison to its corporeal host. As Miria's spirit - her Malefactour - manifested, it seemed to almost merge with the girl. It raised its head, and glared at the being in front of it, rings under its eyes, and teeth jagged and gnarled. The most gleaming feature of the beast were its eyes - a dark celadon green, with pupils that seemed almost like windows. Just visible behind them, a starry sky lingered, starlight and void swirling inside of the ghost. Miria's scream pitched up, and the visual assault on the being around her was joined by an assault on their ears. Her cry became a deafening blast of static, the shade echoing the death cries of the universe itself, its shriek shaking the ground and cracking what glass remained fixed to the windows of the airship around it. Its cry grew only louder, until the static sharpened into a high-pitch whistle.
Finally, Miria's screaming stopped, and the remnants of the crystal exploded once again, another cannon-shot booming into the air, and causing the girl to stumble backwards and fall. The dark energy sizzled off quickly in the air around them, and the static shrieks echoed into the distance. The spectacular, terrifying power that had been stored in Miria's artifact had been released, leaving her alone once again, and allowing silence to return to the lake.

Miria sat on the ground, leaning back on her arms, eyes wide with disbelief. She wasn't screaming any more, although she likely could have done with a little cry to get what had just happened out of her system. She wasn't even sure what she had just done - she wasn't sure she was totally conscious then. Her shadow seemed to return to being just a shadow, and Miria herself was left still standing - or sitting - between Madi and the others, frozen in shock, and too dazed to even bother moving. What little remained of her crystal was mere dust and pebbles on the ground nearby, except for a single sliver of stone, resting in the middle of the pile.

Tenmza looked down at Lee. "Stay out of this you bizzare magi. This is between me and the abomination!" He screamed at Lee. "That thing wanted to send us back to the Imperative's cells to save her own people. I will not go back there!"

The tengu was not going to easily back down from this, he was committed on making Madi pay dearly for her action. He can feel his blood pumping through him like a torrent of water flowing through a hose. His pupils were dilated as he stared down at Lee like a raptor eyeing down it's prey, each deep breath he took was a clue of more rage he was keeping within his body.

Lee could even see veins bulging out from the tongue's arm as he grip his spear with enough force to break bones. All Tenmza can hear was the blood rushing through his ears, feeling his heart pumping as quickly as machine gun, mind consume by betrayal and rage.

It was in this state that he ignored the fainting among some members of the group, it was this state that made him lift his hand to try and push Lee away, it was also this state that made him ignore Miria's cries to stop. Before he can bring his hand down on Lee the tengu stopped as an explosion of dark energy came from the small nekomata like creature.

The dark energy made the tengu pull the spear out from Madi as he began to back away, the rage that was etched to his face was gone in an instant. Fear and shock now replaced. Yoshinori would quickly cast a barrier around himself once he felt the Abyssal power coming from Mirira. Like Tenmza he felt immense fear once he felt the power.

The dark energy they were seeing, the black squares materializing and dematerializing, the shadows themselves gaining form and rising on their own accord. This felt and look like the ruinous power of the Abyss.

The two yokais knew they couldn't stay if she was truly channeling the abyss itself. They can not risk becoming corrupted by it. When she look at the tengu he thought to fly away but soon his ears were assaulted by an infernal scream. He dropped his spear as he covered his ears, trying so desperately to block out the scream from assaulting his ear drums and brain.

He can feel his body vibrating from the frequency of the scream. The screaming would stop once he felt ankrgst explosion of energy. The tengu would open his eyes and look at Mirira, now on the ground, back to normal.

The tengu would stand still looking at her. It was the Inugami who would speak fir the tengu. "What was that power?! Was that the Abyss that you channeled?!" He demanded in an accusatory tone. Yet fear could be detected in his voice. Both yokai seem greatly disturbed by the recent events.

Tenmza in particular used the brief window provided by Yoshinori to grab his spear from the ground and point it at the group, using it to keep any wound be attackers away from him.

Miria blinked several times, before she finally snapped back to reality. The girl began to stutter, and then whined loudly and started crawling back. "Dark!", She yelled, not giving much context. She grabbed her backpack and fished out her tablet, blue screen flashing on, and began scrolling furious through a series of screens, pulling up several paragraphs and charts. I know! I know this!", She hissed. The tablet turned off, and Miria hopped up, bowing deeply to the Tengu and Inugami. "I'm sorry!", She cried, repeating the same for Madi, Lee, and everyone else. Despite her apparent angst, however, there seemed to be a newfound energy to her movements. In fact, she almost appeared excited, although she was keeping it restrained. "That's a Malefactour! I think.", She said...as if they'd know what that was. "Oh. Erm...soul stuff. I can explain. Maybe. Um...", She trailed off. Her gaze fell to her ruined crystal, and she winced. "Should be nothing to worry about, if the stone is destroyed.", She said, crouching down and tapping her dagger to it. She frowned when it did glow.

"Well...um..."

Miria stood up again, and bowed again, mostly to Tenzma. "It's my fault! That's an artifact from my home, but it was tainted! It's power is depleted. Forgive me.", She said. "Janavar like me have a spiritual anchor to the Darkness. It's part of our covenant. I've had minor incidents with the stone before, and now I think it was reacting with me, and my...well, bad feelings. I didn't intend for that to happen, I just wanted to keep everyone from fighting!"

There was a snap, like a bungee cord failing. The whole world seemed to drop out from under Kiara's feet. It was a familiar sensation; an instantaneous and instinctive reaction to a certain stimulus. She wasn't sure at first why she felt such an intense, immense pressure on her chest or why her vision had blurred. Slowly, she put a finger to the corner of her eye, sliding her hand underneath her blindfold, and felt... water. But not freshwater, like that in the lake; it was brine intermingled with tiny flakes of skin and urea. The next breath she took was sharper than she intended, and the next after that was practically a gulp. Lightheadedness followed; wooziness and an intense chill. She felt birds' talons about her heart, caressing the surface of her lungs and slithering about underneath her ribs. Everything tilted and she stumbled to one side. She breathed in, she breathed out. Again, again, again, faster and faster until she was doing it so often that the air around her whined.
Her next words arose like bubbles from a bog; unprompted and unwanted. "I'm sorry," she blurted in a chittering, deafening tongue. "I'm sorry," she whispered, her words being delivered too quickly for anyone to hear. But that pained expression on her face - the grimace that stretched from cheek to cheek, the furrows in her brow, the taut muscles all around her jaw... she felt cold and alone. Abandoned in the back seat of a car, waiting for someone - anyone - to come find her. She remembered words of encouragement: "I can take it." "I trust you." "I don't care: I want to talk with you anyway." ... and the blare of sirens. Screaming, an empty and bloody cot: a picture of a noose and words of vitriol. She deserved it. It was her, not them. She understood why they were angry. They were right. She was... sh-
...
Pain.
Just the slightest, minutest, most insignificant glimmer of pain.
Like the first snowflake in winter.
Falling.
Slowly.
Inevitably.
Kiara's hand went to her cheek, sliding over the plastic flesh that she had grafted onto herself. Dry. Dry. Dry... wet. Her finger was slick, ever so slightly. She could feel the fluids inside her face welling to the surface, as if tears from a child's eyes. Tears from a father's eyes, tears from a widow's eyes: tears shed by a family united in mourning and hatred. Blame and guilt; familiar sensations washed over her. For a moment she saw herself somewhere else, somewhere... darker, and emptier, and unknown; a light flickering overhead and a complex of scribbles on the wall - deadly diagrams and words that would only ever be privy to herself. Promises to people, promises to herself. Promises to make the world better by excising something wrong from it.
She was injured. Not much - a tiny fragment of rock had been chipped off of a lump in the earth and had been sent flying when Tenzma had whipped his spear toward the group but it had still retained enough momentum as it flew to burrow its way through the makeshift skin that she'd given herself and prick the surface of her facial muscles. It must've destroyed a few dozen cells, maybe even less, but that was enough. It was always enough, always too much. They couldn't even shake her hand in case they crushed its delicate fingers in their firm, warm grips.
Her eyes widened 'til they were practically saucers. She clasped both hands over her cheeks and took five, six, seven strides back. "No, no!" Her voice warbled. "Don't look at me! Get away, I can't-" She was cornered, stuck in a room of time-bombs. Soon everybody would know. Very, very soon, they would all realize what she was. "I just... I'm sorry, I'm..." she never finished the sentence.

Lee had been disoriented by the sudden appearance of the dark energy. It had messed with his magic sense and had overloaded it a bit, but he was still aware of everything around him. It just took him a few moments to recover. By then it had disappeared and Miria was explaining what had happened. "Well, that sounds like a good thing, and luckily next time I shouldn't be overloaded by the magic from it."

The tengu and Inugami looked at the Janavar as she tried to explain what this "Darkness" was. But her stuttering made it difficult for them to fully understand her. "What is this darkness your people made a pact with? Is it anyway related to the Entopic Force?" Yoshinori asked, still gaining some insight from her panicked ramblings.

The tengu would and Inugami pick up on Kiara rambling and by instinct would turn to face her... unaware of the dangers of doing so. When Tenmza looked at at Kiara the tengu would do something that would shock everyone. He began to cry. The tengu would go down on his knees. "What have I done?"

The tengu would soon raise his spear, blade pointed at his waist. Before he can bring it down he would feel a force holding his spear and hands in place. Yoshinori was holding his hands forming hand sign. "What is wrong with him? I never seen him acting like this?"

The ghoul bear collapsed to the ground as the spear was pulled from her chest, fur dyed crimson and eyes closed. Midna flew over to Madi, both Hylians following, ignoring everything else for the time being.

"Doesn't appear to be an exit wound but I need to make sure." The imp inspected the bear for a few seconds, then rolled her over with Twi magic and examined her wound. "It's deep, obviously, but she'll live. I don't know if health potions will do anything."

"They're all mad, I swear, every last one of them." The Hero of Twilight shook his head and knelt besides the stricken shapeshifter, finding that she was looking straight at him.

'Maybe you're crazy too and you just don't know it yet.'

"...You're speaking to me inside my mind, how are you doing that?"

'Side effect of the ashes, it's telepathy. Don't worry about me, I'll live.' The bear attempted to get up but collapsed to the ground and simply lay there, eyes closed. What she didn't know was that the other two could hear her as well. 'Kiara's going on about something, I wonder what it is...'

Then Midna gasped alond. "Link! She has blood magic!" Her voice was full of alarm as she looked down at both Heroes, who both realized that she was speaking to both of them. "I can conjure a magical shield of sorts, it will protect you but I don't know for how long."

"What's blood magic?"

"It's an incredibly dangerous, ancient type of magic, it makes people go insane and all sort of things. They act unlike themselves, have hallucinations, dark thoughts. There's no time to explain." The cursed Twilight Princess summoned a shield made from Twilight magic and surrounded her, Madi, and both Heroes. "I hope that's enough... If not..."

Meanwhile, Dragmire had put up several wards of his own and was attempting to heal Kiara via spells from about fifteen feet away, whether the spells were going to do anything, he had no idea.
Further more, the wrecked airship was leaking oil, which caught on fire, which then caused the wreck to explode.
Molten metal rained down around the group as a fireball launched into the ash filled sky and came down in the lake, sending water everywhere.

“...Could this possibly get anymore worse?” It was mostly impossible to tell who the voice belonged to due to the ash flying through the air.
“Yeah. It can and will get a lot worse.”
Madi had turned back and was now trying to heal herself, sitting up against a line rock for support. “Airship blew up, we all might go insane from Kiara’s blood, what else is going to happen....”

Neurological damage. Tenzma's nerves squirmed and shriveled. Decades of his life - his childhood that he looked back on so fondly, his friendships, his accomplishments - turned from the foundations of his psyche into hammers chiseling at his self worth. How could he have been so happy when he had committed such a sin? How could he repent, how could it ever have come to this? The world's eyes were on him, overflowing with dynamic loathing and condemnation. He deserved it, utterly. The pain, the grief, the hatred he had sowed was coming back to him now; a blighted crop which he had no choice but to eat. His thoughts blackened and turned sour like fruit being boiled until they were just a frothy brown paste. Millions of images flashed through his mind: recontextualized moments from his life. His mother embracing him - he felt so sorry for her, hugging a monster without knowing that it was as such -, his childhood friends walking with him to school - he understood now that they had never cared about him. Their words had been placative and insincere, barely hiding their contempt -, his attempt to lush himself up before proposing to his wife - of course she had said yes. She had been a saint, trying to isolate him from the world. He was a repulsive, malignant, asocial bastard; a disgusting lump of flesh which hurt innocent children without reason.

Eyes danced before his own. Yellow, blue, red, green; the eyes of everyone he had ever inflicted pain upon. They were innumerable. They were not a colossus, they were a world: there were as many of them as stars in the sky, and they formed a contiguous dome over him for parsecs in every direction. The pressure of their attention, the weight of their antipathy, was crushing. He drowned in their resentment. Every particle grew fiery with hate. His skin burned, his whole body felt as if it was unmaking itself. He heard, as if he had ears in every spot in the universe, screaming from every direction and every location. Screams of condemnation: cries for something to be done. He wanted it. He wanted it, so badly. Justice for her, justice for the child. He chewed his tongue until it was a mangled mess and breathed in the blood. His body instinctively coughed and retched, and he hated it for doing so: why was his body trying to prevent his death? He deserved to die. Nobody deserved to have to suffer his existence. Just existing was already agony; the guilt ran like oil through his veins, saturating his every thought, dream and idea.

Kiara despised it. The familiarity. The anger, the screaming, the stench of blood. Why couldn't she just be nothing? Why couldn't she ever be vulnerable, ever show anyone her eyes, be loved, be allowed to love? Skye had been her best friend but the opposite hadn't been true. Kiara had begged to go with her on her journey because she'd only ever meant something - been worth anything - in the eyes of that incredible, eccentric, brilliant girl. Now she was dead, and she was worth something to nobody. Every time she opened her mouth, every time she looked at someone without remembering to put in her contact lens, this happened. She killed, she hurt, she maimed, and was never persecuted in response because it was never her "fault". But it was, she knew that it was because she always had a choice: the choice to keep existing or to stop. And in every second of every minute of every day of her life, she continued to make the wrong decision. Over and over and over, she kept deciding to live.
Receiving The Spark, the burden, should've absolved her of the guilt of living - but it had only exacerbated the issue. Now she felt coddled by the world, only permitted to continue being an abject failure because she had pragmatic, objective value. She didn't want that to be the case, she wanted to hand it over and move on.

She was five again, watching a whole room of children tearing her best friend to pieces because he had handed her a pair of scissors incorrectly. They hugged her afterwards and told her that the boy could never hurt her again. She was seven again, watching a subway car packed to the brim with men and women screaming and killing each other with their teeth and nails even as they were torn to shreds themselves, fighting in her name. The train arrived on time. In the end it had taken four men to pull her out of the waist-high ocean of gore. None of the bodies could be identified. She was ten again, watching a street mob pouring gasoline over her family and setting a match to it just because they had bumped into her and she had fallen onto a hard stone. Her father begged to die. Her mother wept for joy as she was burnt and her tears boiled inside her eyes.

Her classmates had snapped out of it days later. Two thirds of them had to be institutionalized forever. The other third were given counselling. Most took their own lives. A week after the incident aboard the train-car, she found two severed fingers in her pocket. The flesh beneath the nails had belonged to seventeen different people. The whole street mob was arrested and tried. All were acquitted. Most asked to be euthanized. The rest died after two weeks of sleepless agony.

There was nothing to be done. The conclusion was foregone. Kiara would've just stood there if there hadn't been a swell in her stomach, a sudden surge in her abdomen. She knelt and stuffed a handful of dirt into her mouth. If she had possessed any dignity that she could've still lost, now it was utterly gone. She crammed soil between her teeth and into her throat and clasped a hand over her mouth but it was not enough. She regurgitated a chunky mass of pulverized flesh, blood and loam, sopping wet and blue as the sky.
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Menschenfleisch
Diplomat
 
Posts: 766
Founded: Nov 01, 2017
Corrupt Dictatorship

Postby Menschenfleisch » Sat Feb 22, 2020 6:57 pm

The Great Wizarding War | Kiara and Polly

Something was distinctly... off? No, more like different about Katya. Polly didn't exactly know what it was that separated her from every other shrink and soldier she'd met but something tugged at the back of her mind, like a half-remembered instinct. It wasn't a memory – the ones that she'd gained during the last forty years were truly gone – but a skill of some sort. Maybe she'd always had this sort of intuition about her and it was only emerging now, or maybe she'd cultivated it before she'd had her mind wiped and it was now resurfacing. Either way she felt salt in her mouth and the taste of iron; her muscles tensed up as if expecting an attack and her vision clarified without her even meaning for it to do so. ”Katya...” The word was sour inside her mouth. She didn't feel biased against the woman in any way, she'd been the only person who wasn't under AEGIS' employ that she'd met since her arrival at the base and she certainly seemed to be engaging Polly on rather candid terms, but they still seemed to be at odds somehow. They were a wolf and a jackal fighting over the same scraps of flesh, said scraps being Polly's remaining self image. But did Katya even know what she was doing? The woman seemed to be totally relaxed. Her posture, her words, her tone – they all suggested that she was utterly at ease. This was... the same thing that she'd felt when she'd met Johann, only more chaotic and more... defined? No. Collected! Yes, that was the word.

”Thanks.” Was that all that she could muster? No, surely not. She had to keep the ball rolling, keep the conversation flowing in both directions. ”My friends...” She shifted her eyes toward the one-way glass without turning her head. ”... got away, yeah. Not much to say about that, really. It was a mess. As for being a bad person, I... I'm not worried about being bad, I'm worried about... I dunno. Being less.” The recordings; they were reminders that she had lived up to a dream once – came up with and achieved a goal. A terribly difficult to achieve goal, too. It was proof that, good or bad, small or great, she had been successful. It was, at once, a reminder that she could do great things and a force driving her to do such things. She might've been happier not knowing about her past self, truth be told, but where would that leave her? As a child in the mind of an old, decaying body, that was what.

At that moment Caitlin – or rather, September, as Polly had been instructed to call her – chose to interrupt. It seemed as if nothing had been learned and yet, she felt as if she'd gained an enormous edge in this game of psychological chess that she was playing with Johann. The man could put his best pieces forward: his rooks, his bishops, his queen - Polly threw an askance glance at Katya as she thought of that last piece – but she was confident that she'd not been mated, and that Johann was in no position to do so in the first place. She knew that the kind faces surrounding her were supposed to sell her a certain image of AEGIS but she knew that even as they influenced her, she was influencing them. Professionalism and altruism were very different things and she could tell who proscribed to which philosophy. As long as she ingratiated and endeared herself to the kind and powerful people put in front of her she could tug on the puppet-strings that Johann seemed to determined to sew into her joints. Not enough to control him, perhaps, but at least enough to ensure her continued independence. However, then came the issue of moderation. If she made her efforts to resist his control too obvious they'd just throw her in a lab and excise her cerebellum or somesuch. She had to remain cautious, careful, attached at the elbow to the people who had the authority – or at least the will – to speak out against anything that might put her life in danger. She may have been seen to be overthinking it. She was not.

”A surprise?” That was vague. Very vague. Something important was about to happen and Polly'd be damned if she was going to be caught off guard. ”I don't have anything to pack.” Her response was flat, cold and completely insincere. She wore her emotions on her sleeve for now; her desire to get whatever it was that was about to happen out of the way. The more she spoke and the more time she gave AEGIS to prepare whatever it was they wanted to show her, the more likely it was that they would succeed in what they were trying to do – and frankly, she considered their goals to be about as aligned as two vectors whose dot products were nil... which indicated perpendicularity, if she was remembering correctly. ”Lead the way.”

Seeds of Anxiety | Avarice and Tone

There were few streaks of blood: mostly splatters and puddles, coagulated and clung-to by thick layers of ash and stony dust. The leaden walls, previously monuments to the sheer, obscene banality of concrete, were punctuated by freshly applied splotches of black plasma and heme. On the floor lay the usual instruments and artifice of struggle; bullet casings, discarded weapons, knives, improvised blackjacks and severed appendages. The sheer quantity of cadavers, however, was beyond unusual. Unless the Fates had remained entirely convinced that they could pull out a victory during the whole fight right up until their annihilation - which was exceedingly unlikely considering just how badly they had been curb-stomped - or their egress had been prevented somehow, there really wasn’t any explanation as to why they would’ve stuck around so long even after they started dying in droves. Valerian took in the whole scene at once, trying to reconstruct the battle from its initiation ‘til the moment that AEGIS arrived. He knelt beside a particular corpse, that of a man in a stevedore’s uniform: denim overalls, brown and many-pocketed shirt, worn cargo pants with seams on the knees… nothing out of the ordinary, really - although it wasn’t precisely the Fates’ typical fashion sense. The cause of death was readily apparent: his heart was approximately seven times as wide as it should’ve been and halfway protruded from his ribcage like a partially emerged chestburster. He glanced at the weapon in the man’s hand, a fairly typical revolver. Its barrel was worn and its grip was weathered: it had seen some use. In spite of all his efforts however, it was essentially impossible to reconstruct the timeline of events due to just how esoteric every aspect of the crime scene was. It would’ve taken a scion of general occultism several days just to determine how the man’s heart had come to be so large and then several more just in order to find out where the spell had been cast from, let alone who had cast it. He could’ve done it himself - his intuition was probably up to par - but he lacked the requisite physical knowledge to do so. ”I don’t think inductive reasoning is going to help much here, Valley.” ”It never was my forte.” ”Then what is?” ”Homicide. Or I guess it would be xenocide, since I’m a one-of-a-kind species.” Ava prodded the knees of a man whose hands had been fused to a beam above his head, and whose lower torso was but a pile of thawing, ground-up crystals on the ground beneath him. ”(Pfft. Heh.)” ”What are you laughing at?” ”PMT.” ”PMT… post mortem tumescenc- Ava, fuck off. That’s not funny.” ”No, not that: PMT. Photomultiplier tubes! Look.” She pulled the man’s phone out of his breast pocket and snapped it in half between her hands, somehow making the split occur perpendicular to the phone’s screen, essentially creating a cross-section of its internal components. She presented it to Valerian, pointing to a cluster of white tubes mounted on the interior of its casing. ”Look at ‘em! They’re so cute! L’il squiggly, squidgy vacuum tubes. They’re such good boys!” She took a moment as if to compose her thoughts. ”Such functional nested amplificatory photodiodes, I mean. Same difference.” Seeing her so cheery was… unsettling, to say the least. She took exception to killing, but only while it could be avoided. After the fact, people stopped being people and just started being cadavers. It was an extremely pragmatic way to look at the world, Valerian supposed, but it clashed with his sensibilities in a rather disquieting way. ”And the masks… those are outside of my field of expertise as well.” ”Is there anything you can do?” ”Stand around and look pretty, I guess.” ”You’re not pretty.” ”I’m flattered.” ”You’re not that either.” Words could not express how chuffed he was to hear that.

Of course, eventually, something else came up. Two skeletons to be exact. Had he… had he seen them before? ”Holy shit. It’s Sans Undertale!” Avarice leapt forward to grab the paralyzed osteal system’s hand, shaking it vigorously in her own. ”I know you! Remember that incident involving the ship, the fire-breathing badger and the deaths of approximately seventeen thousand crewmen aboard a First Order spacecraft? That was when we first met!” ”Oh. I do faintly recollect an incident involving two animate skeletons.” ”Yeah, it was wild! Clams for days, am I right? And my god, the inflatable bouncy castle was just the cherry on top!” ”I… are we talking about the same thing?” Yadda yadda. Gunshots. Fuck me, I gotta go. Vale pulled some dudes behind cover or some shit idk. Ava probably just stood there and took the bullets. See y’all nerds later. "Calm down!" Ava's voice was like a verbal guillotine, systematically assassinating the will to fight in anyone who heard her. "Put that thing down and let's talk this through. One of my names is Avarice. What's yours?"
Last edited by Menschenfleisch on Sat Feb 22, 2020 7:56 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Rostavykhan
Minister
 
Posts: 2184
Founded: Sep 30, 2017
Corrupt Dictatorship

Postby Rostavykhan » Sat Feb 22, 2020 10:16 pm

The Great Wizarding Rebellion
Katya


"Less?"

Less. The New Polly was worried that she wasn't as good as The Old Polly - that she lacked the same ambition and drive, or that she was a failure in comparison. Katya empathized with that feeling. She hated feeling like she was a failure. It was part of the reason she put on the act she did. It was that admission from Polly, in fact, that impacted Katya enough make her drop her facade, just a little bit. She stopped smiling, and her eyes seemed to narrow on Polly. She was with AEGIS, who she was convinced were able to help her understand who was really was, rather than her other companions, and now AEGIS had brought Katya in, in an attempt to help Polly with that endeavour...

As soon as the door opened, her smile returned. Katya cocked her head back to listen to the news, quirking her brow when September told them to pack up. "Everything I would already have packed is run into a ditch in the woods, last I checked.", She stated, her voice cracking slightly at that last bit. She...was still not happy about her car. That model was far from cheap. "I dislike weighing myself down with many items on my person. I'm ready for this surprise, if you two are.", She stated, her eye twinkling again. Where else would they be heading this time, she wondered? AEGIS sure liked to keep a lot of secrets and surprises up their sleeves, it seemed.
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Naval Monte
Postmaster-General
 
Posts: 13807
Founded: Sep 04, 2014
Civil Rights Lovefest

Postby Naval Monte » Sun Feb 23, 2020 2:58 am

The Great Wizarding Rebellion

"True, you arrived here with nothing much. Your friend came here with a now totalled car and with ruined clothes that we had to incinerate along with her weapons which miraculously survived contamination. Those are being moved into crates so I guess you two can move along." She turned her back to them. "Just follow me so you two don't get lost." 

She would turn over to look over at Katya. "Actually you change first and than I will lead you two out." She told the Russian. After giving Kayta a chance to change into some new clothing, Caitlin would finally lead them through the halls of the base.

Without the chaos of the containment breach the two would the hall was bright and sterile, walls spotless and the lights being oddly dim than what one would expect for the facility. "You know there is something I discovered after being in different worlds. The sun from my world is dim. At least compared to the other worlds I have been too." She told the two as they went past a worker moving jars containing different coloured butterflies. 

"I went to a world where superhuman hunters fight giant monsters with comically large weapons. Fought in multiple alien worlds in possibly the first multiversal war, and now I'm stationed in here, and in all three their suns were too damn bright when compared to ours. Seriously, it was a hindrance for us for a while, especially during the war. We hid the fact the other suns were giving us trouble, that was why we wore visors back in the Wizarding War and masks now." 

Caitlin didn't know of a good topic to make with the two girls so she just went with whatever was on her mind. In hindsight she was now regretting the topic she chose but it was too late to undo it now. She will have to wing it. "I wonder if there are other worlds where humans are mostly the same but have a few minor differences that sets them apart from each other?"

The two would more workers moving supplies throughout the hallway and even some wearing exosuits to carry heavy crates and machines. The group would have noticed that during the trip they never once saw the parts damaged, or perhaps they were quick on cleaning up on some areas? 

The two would soon reach the exit and the two would see not only the wreckage of the previous fights and escapes but Anderson standing with his back turned from them, his hands behind his back as he was looking up at the sky. Anderson would hear the two women and the one child trapped in an a woman's body approaching him from behind.

"September, I'm glad you came. I was worried you would miss the surprise." He told her without looking back. "Yeah I wasn't going to miss that because it's rare for you to be secretive like that sir. Is there a good reason for that?" Caitlin asked, her curiosity over the matter growing. Anderson smiled. "Well we have a few minutes until it arrives." 

It? Caitlin thought. From the air she saw a rift form. She would see a few tilt rotor crafts fly off the rift and go down to the base. Caitlin almost thought that was the surprise but tossed the thought aside as quickly as it appeared; she knew it was the wrong one. AEGIS being able to create their own rifts to allow vehicles to appear in new worlds isn't that new.

As crafts finish departing from the rift the group would see the rift slowly getting bigger. "What on Earth?" This was an odd development the agent thought. The more the rift grew the agent would suddenly recall something. This phenomenon happened before. Back in the Second Lylat War.

"Anderson, is that what I think it..." Caitlin would never have the chance to finish as the rift, now immensely long and wide, would unveil something.


Something that blot out the sun

Time began to slow as a dark colossus flew of the rift and flew towards the base. Anyone who tried to ignore the activities of the rifts would drop whatever it was they were doing once they saw what the large rift allowed into the world, especially as the thing was now over the base.

Above everyone was solid blackness, broken up by red and white lights shining like stars on a night sky. The massive dark shape was triangular in shape. The shape was smooth and aerodynamic, infact it was nothing more but a massive wing. Time seem to slow even more as the aerial behemoth hung over them.

There were many things that made this craft seemingly impossible to exist despite the fact it was flying above them. The two most pressing was how can it fly even though it had eight massive engines behind it. The other was how were the things silent?

Even though Caitlin seems to have known what it was she still looked as shocked as Polly and Katya; though hers was more on finally getting a good look at the enormity of the craft from the ground as it flew past them, the engines produced eight bright stars in the middle of the day. From the same colossal rift several jets and helicopters would fly out, the former following the large flying wing while the helicopters would land down to aid with the moving.

"I don't know how Johann did it but he convinced the UK government to allow us to bring that into their airspace. No doubt he withheld a few key pieces of information so he can sway their opinions to allow them to approve most if not all his requests. After all,  we're doing most of the work when it comes to the anomalies plaguing their nation and we know how to handle them." 

Anderson wonder how the people in parliament will react now once they see what it was Johann made them bring into their world? At this point it was too late fir them to resend their agreement.

Anderson would turn to face the three. "Starting today our new home in this world will be Argos. Neither these so called muggles nor the mages will be able to reach us in there. More importantly we can now be anywhere in the UK. With the Argos we can reclaim all of the anomalies we lost and reestablish our position in the nation." 

Caitlin was unsure what to say on the news. "Are you serious? We are staying in that thing?" Caitlin turned to see a young man in his twenties. Skinny build and of medium height, the man had caucasian features that was slightly tanned due to spending so much time outdoors. His hair was covered by a helmet but everyone can see his face as the mask dangled on his neck like a necklace. His blue eyes looked at Anderson with the same joy a child would have after being told they will be receiving something they would consider to be cool.

Anderson smiled. "I'm not the type to lie about matters like this boy. The Overseers are very adamant on us fixing this screw up so they aren't pulling back any punches for this. Especially after what happened to some of our colonies in New Republic space." 

That was news. Caitlin would look to the other man and he had the same expression. What happened to the colonies they fought for? "I'll explain it to you and your team later September. Right now I believe it's best you meet up with your team and board one of the Ospreys to go to the Argos." Both she and the man would follow his order. 

"I know where the others are Sep." The man would turn to the other two. "You're the newbie and the spy huh? You two are much younger than I thought." Caitlin rolled her eyes. "You should know that no lady likes having her age being brought up Jenkin. " the man now known as Jenkins would double back. "I didn't mean it like that ma'am. I was just expecting them to match with what the reports described them. Though some of it was hard to fall. I mean war is chaotic in general but the war this world had was just one random cluster fuck after the other." 

Caitlin couldn't disagree with him there. When she had the free time to read up the reports on what happened to this world after hearing her team was assigned to be stationed in jt she was utterly baffled by what she read. 

"Hopefully things won't go as crazy as that war." Jenkins nodded. "Yeah. I'd rather sit out on being a part of another war after fought two at the same time." September agreed. The two would lead them through the yard as people and materials were boarding the crafts. 

"So how are your wounds Jenkins?" The woman asked. Jenkins would rub his shoulders. "I'm all better now. It was embarrassing wearing that diaper thing but that Bacta stuff is incredible. I only have a few tiny scratches but even those look like they will disappear soon. I'm glad we kept our partnership with the New Republic because their medical tech is incredible. Too bad their computers suck." 

September would laugh. "Yeah, Warren wouldn't shut up about that or the fact ther blasters shot bolts slower than bullets. But honestly their speed is a mercy after what I saw what blaster bolts can do to a tank." The woman shutter as she recalled just how devastating those bolts can be when they hit their target. It was no surprise that AEGIS direct energy weapons research saw a boost in funding and attention after being in the receiving end of a blaster and turbo laser guns.

Caitlin would turn her attention to the two traveling with her and Jenkins. "Sorry for kicking you two out of our conversation there. But at this point I won't be surprised if you two have questions." Caitlin would look forward and would smile once she saw her team both standing and sitting next to one of the dropships. "I'm sure me and my team will be glad to tell us the stuff in our war that isn't classified." The two agents would lead the two women to their team to meet them.
Last edited by Naval Monte on Sun Feb 23, 2020 3:19 am, edited 3 times in total.
Naval Monte- The Mediterranean crossroads of mind-controlling conspiracies, twisted dimensions, inhuman depravity, questionable science, unholy commerce, heretical faiths, absurd politics, and cutting-edge art.

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Aedroxus
Civil Servant
 
Posts: 8
Founded: Jan 25, 2020
Ex-Nation

Postby Aedroxus » Sun Feb 23, 2020 12:22 pm

Tides of Change
Kabal

Tath nods to himself as he hears Wilson explain that they will also be willing to defend themselves should he try anything, silently accepting that neither side fully trusted the other. This whole exchange is going to be... interesting. He thought. Soon Wilson would begin explaining who his group was, but before he could finish Ordis interrupts: "Operator, massive spacial distortions are beginning to form in the area! They are very similar to the one that brought us here!" Tath glances out the window, and his eyes go wide at the sight:

An armada.

Tath listens over the coms as Wilson begins talking with this Fleet Admiral Sagalyn, hoping to diffuse any hostilities before they occurred. Ordis cautiously speaks at this point, his voice a near whisper: "Operator... do you have a suggested course of action? Ordis is not certain what we should do." Tath grimaces, eyeing the huge fleet before them. "Well, Ordis, there's really only one thing we can do: prepare and wait with baited breath. I want the Archwing ready to go should they decide to attack, and see if you can't get the Void Cloak operational at least. We need to be ready for the worst." He said. Let's just hope I'm being paranoid about these guys as well, or else I don't think this will end well. Tath thinks to himself, as he waits for the exchange to continue...
"Dream not of what you are, but of what you want to be."

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Wysten
Minister
 
Posts: 2604
Founded: Apr 29, 2017
Inoffensive Centrist Democracy

Postby Wysten » Mon Feb 24, 2020 3:00 pm

Credit to Wysten and Menschenfleisch

Kelli ducked behind the wall as bullets pattered against the wall. Quickly trying to pull back to better cover the Russian forgot her shattered legs and fell with a yelp as her ripped legs made her collapse. *Am I to die fucking here?* Kelli thought to herself as she tried to lean herself up against the wall and loaded another magazine when suddenly that voice made her grit her teeth and cuss a bit as her mind forced her to drop the AK. Kelli had dealt with metas like this before and just had to wait for the Western woman to drop her spell and she would gun her down where she stood. "Fuck you Miss." Kelli would respond making sure her accent came in full force. Though suddenly the Russian coughed and a spray of blood shot out of her mouth onto the pavement. Looking down at her body Kelli realized she would need help fast before she died.

A thick mist of blood and dust hung in the air. Skin flakes clung to ampoules of plasma, the stench of copper and black powder soaked into anything that it could: hair, clothing, cadavers, et cetera. The whole warehouse was bathed in a ghastly glow; dim, smothered sunlight squeezed beneath the windowsills. The world was painted in three colours: black, red and white. The agents hid behind long pillars, upturned tables and rusted machines - whatever they could find. Valerian thumbed the grip of the pistol at his belt, counting the seconds. Avarice was the only thing that broke the monotonous wait. A livid rosegarden of blood bloomed from her clavicle, spreading down over her shirt and jacket. There was a hole around a third of an inch wide in her skin, weeping crimson humours. She pinched the flesh around it and, with a squelch then a pop, a well-formed metal mushroom shot out of the wound, catching in the creases of her palm with a moist smack. She turned it over in her hand, inspecting each of its folds and scars. Little motes of steel, scraped off the interior of Kelli’s rifle, clung to it in streaks, albeit underneath a coating of gore. She flicked it into her mouth bit down with a protracted, heady crunch. Blood spurted from the corner of her lip; the enamel of her teeth gave way and shattered, perforating her cheeks and tongue with miniscule white chips. Her molars erupted and her canines split, revealing within them great deposits of purple pulp which had the same texture as toffee and the savoury tang of goats’ marrow. There were a series of snaps and sharp scratching noises not too dissimilar to those produced by a cracking egg, and then she swallowed hard, downing the bullet, bones and blood. An angry welt of flesh grew over her bloodied, dented gums and formed caps of dentim before they expanded into fully grown teeth. She flashed Kelli a smile and tried to speak, spitting out globs of blood and vitreous calcite as she did so. ”Thanks. I really needed that.”

Kelli's eye would widen as the AK got flung from her hand. Thinking fast she reached for her tags and tapped a small vile as the acid made it disappear. Trying to hold herself over the wall the agents and others would see her green helmet, blonde short cut hair, and her torn up face as her burns had burst from the fall covering the side of the Russian's face. Taking her pistol out she tossed it onto the ground in front of her as it slid towards Avarice. Only having a single hand up in a sign of surrender with the other trying to keep herself up on the wall.

Avarice let out a long sigh, never once losing her smile. ”Oh, wonderful! I knew you’d come around.” Valerian rose from his hiding place, hand still poised to grab his sidearm. ”Hands in the air where I can see them!” His voice was harsh, professional, distant. ”She’s injured, you dumb twat. Her hands are already in the air, too. In the same capacity that everything is in space, I mean.” For once, he ignored her pedantic protestations and inched forward, watching for any sudden movements. ”Get on the floor. We’ll tend to your injuries once you’re in our custody. Do you speak English? Hablo es espanol?”

"No I don't speak English, all I do is drink vodka and get nostalgic over the Soviet Union despite only being an infant when it fell." Kelli retorted as she tried and force herself over the wall as her legs screamed in pain. "Just drag me over this damn wall and get me a god-damn medic." Was her final response before trying to keep herself up right.

”Everyone, at ease.” He held up his hand. A voice piped up from the back; Dowell. “You aren’t in charge, Valerian.” It wasn’t an attempt to reassert authority or fulfil face needs, he was genuinely just concerned for the chain of command. And besides, what did pride matter to him anyway? ”Understood.” His reply was curt without being cold. He and Paige - the infernal mage, apparently now demoted to being a medical orderly and porter - helped bring Kelli toward the centre of the room. Medical equipment was in short supply; they’d come here expecting a fight but they’d been prepared to deal with a few gunshot wounds and burns at most. Her injuries were far beyond their capacity to handle on the spot. Still, they did what they could. They wrapped bandages around her open wounds, soaked up the blood with gauze, applied antiseptic to her cuts and gave her some morphine. The procedure was quick, and greatly expedited by the expertise of all of those present. There wasn’t a single person on the team who hadn’t seen someone get shot before. ”Hey, what’s your name?” Vale looked toward Kelli, trying to discern the emotion on her face. He could tell, however, that she was an interdimensional traveler just like himself and Avarice: she had that certain aura about her that was typical of those outside of their proper time and space.

Feeling the pain killer start to take affect her face went wide with fear as Kelli felt the urge to summon something and blow the brains out of the odd man above her. "Katya" was her only response as she double checked mentally that all of her FSB ids were gone and smiled a bit at them being gone.

”Well kill seventeen thousand crewmen aboard a First Order spacecraft and stuff a coat hanger up Lenin’s tight bumhole: that’s a wonderful name!” What? ”My name’s Ava!” You already told her that. ”That was your cue to introduce yourself, man.” ”...Right. Well then, my name is Valerian. Katya, I know you’re quite confused. This may sound unlikely but you’re in… you’re in another place from where you were before, to say the least of it. What were you doing last? Who are you?”

"I was on vacation in Grozny and I am apparently a former soldier in the Russian Army." Kelli responded falling back on her usual alibi when captured.

”Apparently?” Ava pointed at her own temple. ”Brain damage,” she whispered at a volume greater than her statement would’ve been if she’d just said it normally. Paige took that moment to step forward, holding up a hand. “I’m sorry, Katya, but we’re going to have to bring you in. We’re local law enforcement, we deal with this kind of thing a lot: people who aren’t supposed to be here, I mean. You won’t be hurt, I promise.” Valerian felt a little cheated. The first time that he’d met AEGIS they’d riddled him with bullets and tried to turn him into meatloaf. ”Right. Well, all the best to you,” he nodded at Kelli.

Kelli flattened her hand as her buckle somehow changed from the depth to slightly bulging as it changed from a regular one to an old one she found online. Inside was six small barrels holding caliber 22 rounds. Gazing around the room she just have a sigh as the morphine and blood loss made her pass into a deep sleep.
Last edited by Wysten on Mon Feb 24, 2020 6:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Rostavykhan
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Founded: Sep 30, 2017
Corrupt Dictatorship

Postby Rostavykhan » Mon Feb 24, 2020 9:05 pm

Seeds of Anxiety
Constance


As soon as the bullets began to fly, Constance yelped and ducked into cover. She had no part in whatever was happening, and she didn't want to be anywhere near it. While strangers began to throw rounds at each other outside the alley, she crouched behind a dumpster, keeping her own revolver ready in the off chance that whoever was shooting moved her way. She was scared shitless, and though she didn't want to shoot back at anyone, she'd already gone too far trying to not die, for that to come to an end right now.

Fortunately...she didn't have to run into anyone. Outside the warehouse, Constance remained silent as could be, hugging the wall and listening closely for any signs of activity, trying to determine whether it was safe or not - she didn't even know where she was, but she'd at least feel someone better if she knew that the shooting was over for good. Fortunately, no more guns went off, but the number of voices she heard, muffled in the distance, put her on edge. What were they even talking about, she wondered? Curious, she edged forward, doing her best not to step forward too fast or too hard, which was quite hard in heels. Lifting a hand to her heard, Constance leaned in and held her breath, in an attempt to eavesdrop on the conversation.

Who was Katya? Or Ava? Spacecraft? Constance felt her heart leap. Had she stumbled upon some weird UFO cult? Or were there actual aliens? Oh God, she thought, she'd been abducted by Aliens, and they were making her hallucinate! The thought made her almost panic, and then she heard it - "This may sound unlikely but you’re in… you’re in another place from where you were before." - those muffled words from in the building were...very true for her. And...for whoever the other woman was? And...the others? Constance felt a disoriented, sickening, sinking feeling in her gut. She'd just been in a haunted Church, and she'd been chased by some demon, and now she was...in a different place from where she'd been before...

Fuck it. Fuck it! Constance began to grit her teeth, and the woman quickly stepped forward, her footsteps preceding her arrival out of the alley, towards the group near the building, although she still kept her revolver visible in her hand. She licked her lips; her mouth was as dry as cotton. "What do you mean we're in a different place?", She asked first, getting straight to the point before anyone could question her. Her brow furrowed. "I was somewhere else, too. What's going on?"

The Great Wizarding Rebellion
Katya


That was...something. Katya stared up, wide-eyed, blinking a few times just to make sure that what she was seeing was real and - oh, shit, those engines where bright!

She blinked again and quickly averted her gaze from the back side, although the sheer size of the vessel was enough to keep her eyes fixed on it. She was at awe, although she showed it by laughing, rather than standing in silent shock. She let loose an amuse laugh, throwing her head back and fanning her face with one hand. "Well, isn't that marvellous!", She commented, resting her other hand on her hip and tapping her foot. "That's quite the vessel! Quite overkill for combatting abhumans, if you ask me, but then again, I can't begrudge you for choosing the shock and awe approach! Such power!"

She meant it; she was genuinely impressed, and amused, by the display. It seemed that AEGIS was even better equipped than she thought, and just getting started! It was also honestly rather worrying, considering that they were supposedly helping the Brits, but...oh, who cared? AEGIS wouldn't arrest her or anything for spying! That was why she'd been so open about her profession to them in the first place. Unfortunately, it meant that she'd probably be stuck running with them a bit longer if she wanted to remain, well...not in trouble, or dead. Not that she cared too much about sticking with them, for the time being. She wondered what Polly thought, however, considering that the two of them seemed to be stuck together now. If Polly felt like escaping at any time, then she'd probably realize that being in the sky would make such an endeavour a bit more complicated, at the very least.
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Skylus
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Inoffensive Centrist Democracy

To Be Knighted in a Foreign Land

Postby Skylus » Tue Feb 25, 2020 5:13 pm

The Great Wizarding Rebellion
November 1st, 2019/Rechal 1st, 1756, A. H; 7:00 pm
Buckingham Palace
“The Hero’s Retreat” (guest room 1)


Everyone but the Hero of Twilight had been unconscious for the last twenty-four hours. He had never fainted, instead having been protected by Midna’s shield.

Link knew his life was drastically changing, far more than it did over the course of his adventure as Hero, he had been caught in the “river of destiny”, as they called it, and all he could do was see where it led him.

A lot had happened over the course of the last day. After everyone had fainted and the shield dissipated, an elderly Queen had shown up, along with a regiment of guards. All of them, the Queen included, were very understanding of Link’s situation and had offered to help him the best they could. What he hadn’t been counting on, however, was the fact that the Queen - who named herself “Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor” - had asked him what his lifestyle was like back home, what inventions did he know and was comfortable around, how he had obtained his visible scars, and so on and so forth.

Queen Elizabeth the Second, as she was called, decided to move the conversation into the palace, with numerous guards picking up and carrying the wounded and unconscious; while the Queen revealed to Link that she too, possessed magic, and that she had been a powerful witch when she had been younger. Now, however, she merely healed people.

Once inside the palace, Elizabeth led Link to a private room just off the main hall and handed him a key. “This room is yours for the time being. I hope you’ll find everything to your liking.”

And so far, he liked it quite well.

The room was mostly like his guest room in Hyrule Castle, with a roaring fireplace; stone floor with various rugs; three filled bookshelves lining one wall; a wooden table and chair opposite; a bed - which was not filled with feathers, but rather something else, as it was soft - facing the table, pushed up against the same wall; a chest between the bed and table; an open fire pit in the middle of the room with a cauldron hanging over it; and last but not least, a heated, stone walled, clean, spacious, modern (by his standards), private latrine (with an amazing view of fields and mountains).

The room was solely lit by the fireplace and magical candles, which could be turned on and off with a wave of the hand if you either walked by or up to them; three windows let natural light into the room as well, one above the table, one above the bed, and another in the latrine.

In addition to the aforementioned things, there was also a loft, located above the entranceway, accessed by a ladder placed against the wall by the bookshelves. It was nice, that was all Link could say about it - another bed, more books, three windows (one on each side) and another table.

It had been three hours since he had received the room key and as of this moment, he was lying on the bed, reading one of several volumes about the history of magic (this one focused on the medical aspect). His weapons and knapsack had been tossed on the table and he had discovered a set of cotton-woven clothing on said table two hours ago - a new piece of chainmail, a white shirt with blackened bone buttons running down the right side, - it was a bit too short to be called a tunic - and dark blue leggings.
After some consideration - and several minutes of adjusting the new clothing after he donned them - Link had folded the Heroes’ Clothes and had draped them over the back of the chair, only then noticing how threadbare and worn the dyed tunic and leggings looked, not to mention the tarnished metal pieces adorning the clothes.

An hour had passed since then, and the Hylian wasn’t sure if he liked the new clothing, per say, but it was comfortable.

He also had to admit that he felt somewhat better about his current situation. After all, outside these palace walls was a very advanced, war stricken world, but here, in the palace, everything seemed to be fine. At least things were fine on the surface.

A knock on the carved oak door got Link’s attention and he set the book down next to him, got up, and walked over to the door and opened it to reveal a suited guard.

“Greetings. Queen Elizabeth wishes to see you in the throne room. If you don’t mind, I’d like to take your sword for safekeeping for the time being.”

“It’s perfectly fine where it is, thank you. However I will speak with her.”

The guard stepped back as Link left the room and started to walk down the hallway, then stopped and half turned. “Where is the throne room?”

The guard smiled and waved a hand. “Keep going to your left, turn right when you reach the corner, straight ahead.”

“Thank you.”

Link didn’t see the man walk into the room and exit a second later carrying his sword...


Five minutes later; the throne room

”The Crown now calls Link Farmanne to stand before this Court and Company.”

When the guard had told him that the Queen had wanted to see him, he hadn’t expected to have it be a ceremony.

“Your Majesty, now before you stands the Hero of Twilight, the Seventh Champion of the nation of Hyrule, the Liberator of Many, three of many titles, who bears the arms to witness.”

The Queen rose from her throne and walked down the steps up to the young man standing before her and smiled. “I understand that you are offered knighthood before, I offer it to you again. Link, have you undertaken to accept the accolade of Knighthood that was offered to you first at Hyrule Castle, and now here, at Buckingham Palace?”

“I have.”

“Wonderful.” Eilizabeth motioned to Charles, who stepped forward. “The chain, dear.”

Her son handed over a gleaming Iron-Silver chain and Elizabeth examined it before she smiled again. “This chain has been passed from knight to knight throughout the ages in my kingdom. Let it now pass from knight to knight again.”

She handed the chain to her grandson, William, who gave a nod to Link as Elizabeth started to address other people in the room. “...As members of the Peerage, do you now affirm that Link has, based on what we have heard, grown in gentle virtue and chivalrous grace, the hallmarks of a true and faithless warrior?”

Four men stepped forwards, each wearing different outfits.The Chivalry representative spoke first. “May it please my Lady to know that having heard the counsel of my Peers, and from my own certain knowledge, I am able to confirm that Link is a chivalrous young gentleman whose achievements on the field of honor - of which we only have heard second hand - have been matched by his courtesy and concern for your and his own Majesties’ subjects.”

The second man, representative of the Laurel, spoke next. “Elizabeth, of my own certain knowledge, I am able to affirm that Link has demonstrated, in the very short time I have known him, his abilities in the arts and encourage his practice in his and your kingdom.”

The third, part of the Pelican, spoke next. “I am able to affirm that Link has given freely of his time, of the single day he has been here, in full support of many worthy projects in his and your kingdom.”

The last, a royal representative, simply stated, “Link is a loyal subject to his and your Crown, Elizabeth. I can think of no one better to become a true Knight.”

“I thank you for your wise counsel. Bring forth Lightning, the great sword of state.”

The sword was brought forth by Harry and given to his grandmother, who took it in hand, looked down at it, then raised it a bit. She seemed to be proud. “Link, you have been deemed fit for this high estate by your peers, and have indicated your willingness to accept this honor from my hands. Do you now swear by all that you hold sacred, true, and holy that you will honor and defend the Crown and Kingdom of Great Britain and your own?”

’Is this really happening?’ “I will.”

“That you will honor, defend, and protect all women and those weaker than yourself?”

’Yes. Yes it is. I never thought I would be knighted, and here I am.’ “Yes.”

“That you will be courteous and honor your peers and Acquaintances?”

’I’m just glad there isn’t a crowd. How I loathe crowds.’ “Yes.”

“That you will conduct yourself in all matters as befits a warrior, drawing your sword only for just cause? That you will enshrine in your heart the noble ideals of Chivalry to the benefit of your own good name and the greater glory of Great Britain, and of Hyrule?”

’I wonder what everyone back home will think of me when I tell them I’ve been knighted. I think Zelda will be ecstatic that she won’t have to perform the ceremony herself…’ “I shall.”

Elizabeth raised the sword and motioned for Link to kneel, as he did so, the elderly Queen stepped forwards and placed the side of the sword on the young Hylian’s right shoulder. “Then having sworn these solemn oaths, know now that I, Queen Elizabeth the Second, by right of arms, ruler of Great Britain, do dub you with my sword, Lightning, and by all that you hold sacred, true, and holy. One for Honor.” Elizabeth raised the sword, moved it over Link’s head, then flipped the weapon so the same side now rested on his left shoulder. “Twice for Duty…” She raised the sword again and repeated the last movements. “Thrice for Chivalry…”

She then raised the sword from Link’s shoulder and stepped back, smiling as she handed the sword to William. “Arise, Link, and accept your new title!” It was silent for a moment, as if there was a sense of finality, then Elizabeth spoke again. “Arise, Sir Lincoln!”

’...Sir...I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that.’ The Hero of Twilight slowly rose from his kneeling position and eyed the Queen nervously as she approached him, holding the chain from earlier.

“There’s no reason at all to be nervous.” She offered the chain to Link and he took it, then inspected it before Elizabeth spoke. “The chain you hold has been passed down from knight to knight for three hundred years. Each knight has had some place in my kingdom, and I now offer you one. Now, before you take the oath, I have things to give you. Do you have anything to say beforehand?”

“I do. I’d like to thank you for inviting me into your home unannounced, and allowing me to stay here along with the others until they - we - decide what to do. To be honest, I feel as if I’ve been dragged into this incident without no real say in the matter; personally, I think Madison is simply grasping at straw, so to speak. However, now is not the time to discuss how I feel about the entire situation… I… I suppose that I’d like to thank you personally, Mrs. Wilson, for everything you have done for me in the short time we have known each other.” Link was interrupted by Elizabeth hugging him, then before he could return the gesture, the Queen stepped back and smiled up at him.

“I normally don’t allow people to refer to me any other way besides “your majesty” or “my lady”, but I’ll make an exception. And you’re very welcome, Link.” Before he could respond, the old woman reached out and started to adjust his clothing, as well as tying something around his waist - a dyed crimson sword belt, donned with something that resembled the Hyrulean royal crest. Upon further inspection, it was the Loftwing fighting off two rearing, roaring lions.

“What are you doing, and why are you giving me this?”

“Making sure you look the part, and as for the sword belt, you’ll find out shortly. There.” Elizabeth stepped back and pointed at the chain Link was holding. “Take that chain and say the oath, if you know it. Though I assume you’ll adjust it somewhat.”

And so, after a few seconds, Link nodded, looked down at the magic infused glowing chain, took it in both hands, looked back up at the Queen, and started speaking. It wasn’t the knight’s oath that he somewhat knew by heart, but it was something at least. “I… I suppose I now swear loyalty, homage and fealty to you, your family, and your lands, as well as my own land, and royal family and so on. I will remain true in all ways, serving you and them faithfully - this do I swear, by my belt and chain and by my honor and by the high ideals which I hold as a Knight of this Realm. So say I,” here he hesitated for a few seconds, eying Elizabeth, who nodded and smiled at him, before he seemed to get over his nervousness, then stood straight and held his head high for once. “Sir Lincoln Alexander Farmanne!”

The few in the room started applauding and the Queen hugged Link again, then motioned to Charles to step forward. “There is one last thing I wish to give you. Your sword. Now, I know what you’re thinking, that the sword you wield is an ancient magical artifact that can only be held by you and your own Queen, but the spirit within lets all royals hold it. Accept it again with pride.”

Elizabeth took the Master Sword, scabbard and all, from her son and as she did so, the blade started to glow intently from within. “Accept this sword, which shall symbolize your prowess at arms. Remember well: that the sword of the Chivalry should be drawn only in defense of the realm, or of those weaker than yourself. Wear it with care. Wield it with mercy.”

She handed the sword to Link, who then adjusted it to the new sword belt and looked up as the Queen took the chain from him, then placed it around his neck and stepped back. “Accept this chain, which shall symbolize your duty and your bond as a Liegeman in fealty to the Crown of Great Britain and of Hyrule. Never forget the burden of this chain.”

The room went silent for a few seconds, then the Queen spoke again. “I accept your homage and fealty and pledge to you that from this day forward until the end of my reign, or until you return home, you are My Liegeman that I will honor your order and defend your rights as a warrior - no, hero - and that I will protect the trust that you have placed in me, mighty with justice, tempered with mercy. Link, is there anything that you want to say? I know that this whole ordeal is a lot for you to take in.”

Link thought of many things that he would have liked to say, but there was one thing he was most worried about. “I’d like to think my troubles are over, but there’s just one problem. The man I was fighting before I was teleported here, Ganondorf Dragmire, I’m afraid he’ll turn up.”

The Queen nodded. “Don’t you worry, I’m certain I have one last duel in me, even if I only heal people now. If this Dragmire fellow does show up, we have more than enough people to deal with him.”

“Thank you.”

The other people in the room began to disperse as Elizabeth motioned for Link to walk down the aisle with her, which he did. They stopped near the entranceway to the throne room. “Now then, I’d like for you to check on the others, if you don’t mind. Might help you take your mind off things. I’ve written their rooms down on this paper, if you have any questions, feel free to ask anyone you see roaming the halls, they should be able to point you in the correct direction. Tell those you find to meet here, in the throne room.”

And so, the newly knighted hero walked around the palace, taking in the portraits and artifacts lining the walls. He got lost a few times, but someone was there to help him figure out where he was and how to find everyone’s rooms. He found mostly everyone without incident; they, of course, asked what had happened since they had passed out, what he was wearing, and how long it had been since they had passed out, to which he merely stated that he would inform them when they gathered in the throne room.

After that, Link found himself standing on the back steps, watching the sunset as the sky slowly turned into a mixture of various colors.

He heard footsteps and looked back to find both Kiara and Miria looking up at him. - had they always been that short? They were women, after all - “Hello. I was just sky-gazing. Do you care to join me?”
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Skylus
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Founded: Oct 25, 2016
Inoffensive Centrist Democracy

Postby Skylus » Tue Feb 25, 2020 9:22 pm

Naval Monte wrote:Tides of Change
Kabal

*snip*

Wilson was interrupted as Doug would cut in on following the fighters to the hanger.

"Sorry for this Tath. Yes, follow them to the hanger. The radiation scrubbers probably made the radiation levels tolerable now."

*snip*


Doug eyed the three fighters as they turned around and started to fly towards the massive destroyer, then followed them. "Radiation levels? What do you mean by that? Are your ships powered by nuclear fusion?" As he neared the ship, the pilot waited for some sort of signal for him to land, wherever they wanted him to land.
Proud Member of OCReMix.org and Pixel Mixers
Like to draw, play piano, play video games.
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/mericalgirl1234
To avoid confusion on forums - I am female
VTtM: Madison Goodwill, Link (WW), Amaterasu, Alt. Future Link, Link (TP), Link (BotW) (I’m a Zelda fan okay)
Hogwarts: Derek Forester, Madison Goodwill
RoP: Madison Goodwill, Link (BotW)

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Naval Monte
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Posts: 13807
Founded: Sep 04, 2014
Civil Rights Lovefest

Postby Naval Monte » Wed Feb 26, 2020 3:12 am

The Great Wizarding Rebellion
Site-54


"Using that thing would be overkill on Parahumans unless they are giants, reality warpers, and demi gods. The Argos is really an airborne base and carrier." September explained to Kayta. "Plus it was made for a war against alien primates and reptiles. I'll see if I can share with you some videos we recorded on the battle on thier home world where we let the ship rain down missiles at their capital city."

The two women would soon see the other members of September's team. Warren was fixing some sort of drone and as such ignored them. Dorothy gave the two a smile and waved at them. Weston looked at them before looking at September. "Those are our guests." His thick slavic accent no doubt brought a surprise to Kayta, especially as he sounded Russian.

"Yep. So try not to scare them too much guys." The squad leader told the others. "Well we aren't Reavers so that is a marketable improvement." Mark commented,getting a few chuckles from him and the others. His accent fits the country the two were in. More so than the American Jenkins, the Russian Weston, and the unidentified place September hails from.

Ivanoff was flipping around a switch blade as she watched the others interact. "I think we should head to the ship before our bosses lecture us about being punctual." The Estonian told the others, flipping the blade closed and putting it away in her left pocket.

The group didn't complain much as they began to board the VTOL. Once inside the craft everyone would take a seat. Once there Warren resumes on working on the drone, now trying to add something to it. Weston and Jenkin were looking at a magazine, Mark was smoking with Dorothy looking at the two.

"So you two mind telling us a bit about yourselves?" Dorothy asked. While her question was innocent some in the squad was aware of it being useful information for probably later should it be required.



Tides of Change
Kabal


"Some are fusion powers. Hypermatter isn't cheap for us so we utilize fusion for our ships. However some of our ships use Hypermatter so we need to buy those for them. Also our headhunters engines hse Ion Fusion engines. But right now the radiation levels should be safe. If not we should be able to repair any damages we cause to your body." Wilson told Doug. "You can now board our hanger. Again, sorry for the tight squeeze." 

The headhunters would split up into different directions as they got close the hanger, the pilots leaving Doug alone to do enter the craft. Once he was in the hanger he would see a grayish silver protocol droid waiting for him. Once he landed the droid would walk forward. "Good day to you Doug. I'm 34-K1, a protocol droid. I'm tasked with assistance in translating alien languages and to make sure first contact such as this goes smoothly." The droid said in a oddly cheerful tone. Its mechanical voice possessing a British accent for some odd reason.

"Would you like to see the captain now or wait until our other guests possibly arrive? Either way I'm sure the crew is most anxious on meeting you in person."  Back on the CIC, Wilson would look to the Operator. "Tath. Would you want me to send my team to your ship now? I'd rather not have to tow your ship out of here if we have to flee the system." The captain told him.
Last edited by Naval Monte on Wed Feb 26, 2020 3:38 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Menschenfleisch
Diplomat
 
Posts: 766
Founded: Nov 01, 2017
Corrupt Dictatorship

Postby Menschenfleisch » Wed Feb 26, 2020 3:59 am

The Great Wizarding War | Kiara and Polly

It was like... it was like staring at a wad of spit on God's face. It was defiance, it was pride, it was uncontrollable and unimpeded hubris - and it fucking deserved to feel that way, because it truly was everything that it claimed to be and more. It was a stain on the sky, a gargantuan black geometry that twisted and coiled, forming right angles and edges that gleamed like gemstones and which rendered the air with every twitch, as if the atmosphere was scared to stand in its way. It wasn't light, it wasn't dark, it was just... leviathan. Behemoth, titan, monolith, demiurge and apocalypse. A wave of nausea surged up through Polly's chest, filling her head with starry thoughts and terror. She thought her head might burst with the revelation that something like this could even exist. When she turned to one side she just saw its silhouette billowing out, seemingly travelling forever toward the horizon. The ship was a roof: Atlas' burden to carry, the cadaver of castrated Ouranos. Her next breath was deep, painful and caught on the back of her throat. It was like the dying gasp of an asthmatic, their body executing upon and grasping at basic bodily functions just to distract itself from the monumental corruption of one's world view that the thing before them represented. Everything was recontextualized; the size of her world, the scale of humanity, the importance of herself. She was a child, and this was the first time that she had seen achievement. True achievement, not the result of petty deeds and efforts executed by one man: this was millions of hours of painstaking labour and billions more of study. This was the sacrifice of thousands, the child of orders of magnitude more. She breathed out.

Amazingly, time went on. The universe did not wait for her to comprehend the vessel, it merely kept marching unrelentingly onward. Birdsong still emanated from the woods, the chatter of porters and soldiers still ruffled her eardrums. "Wars," She whispered. "Dead men walking." "Dead men walking. All of them. I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel any more. I might die here. But who cares? Nobody but me, and since when did anyone give a shit about what I thought? My blood is as black as I remember. It's thick and grainy, like sand and gasoline jelly. Carter, are you there? Come back to me, please. It's just another dozen metres. I just need to get out of this trench... isn't the sky beautiful tonight?" Those words had been uttered by another person from another world. Someone who'd been older, wiser, stronger; willing to bleed and nonplussed by it. Somebody who'd known a man called Carter, someone who'd been in a life-or-death situation and had truly believed that they were going to die. The delirium in old Polly's words, the heartfelt resignation, the unconditional happiness that came with believing that there was no chance for you to change the future... all of it was foreign to Polly, now. Once upon a time she had known grief, euphoria, depression and hatred. Now she was an empty and vapid vessel, with no more immediate concerns than what she was going to eat for dinner. She had not seen the same sky as the woman in the recording, nor had she ever fought with all that she had, unlike the woman. She hated it, the sensation of being shallow, textureless and lacking in personality. It was a form of reverse-solipsism: to her, everybody but herself was important.

Snapback. Whiplash. She was plunged back into reality. That domineering feeling of irrelevance evaporated and she was left standing there beneath the ship, physically in awe but not psychologically. Now that her mind had finished adjusting itself in order to accommodate the knowledge that the ship existed, it was just another object to her; another foundational cinderblock upon which her psyche was built. Now, there was a seed in her mind; the kind that could only be planted by an existential-crisis sized trowel. "Maybe I'm..." she whispered, whistling between her teeth with her soft-spoken words. "Maybe I shouldn't be here." Maybe they didn't even need her. Maybe, just maybe, Johann didn't care. "Argos." She rolled the word over her tongue, delicately enunciating every syllable - savouring her first ever attempt at pronouncing the word. "This is..." She swallowed, feeling a lump travel down the front of her neck. "It's big."

She looked around as if to gauge the others' reactions. Nobody, not even Katya, who had never met AEGIS before nor seen such a marvel in her life, seemed to care all that much. Truly, she was alone in this feeling that her world had been turned upside down. She was, even after all her attempts to mature, still playing catch-up. She tuned into the conversation surrounding her just in time to hear September say that the ship had participated in the slaughter of an entire species. The way that the agent described the event was already extremely bad, so how much worse was the truth? AEGIS at this point seemed omnicidal, indifferent and impractical. They seemed not to be pragmatic individuals attempting to survive in a dog-eat-dog world, they were a metaphorical shark in shallow waters populated by goldfish and koi. The institution was so bloated on the perception of their own fallability - borne from a false sense of struggle - that they unironically believed that overkill like this, which possessed enough firepower to match any terrestrial nation on the planet, was justified in the face of the loss of one facility. That, or AEGIS truly was as sensible as they believed themselves to be, and the wrath that they could bring to bear against their enemies dwarfed even the incomprehensibly vast proportions of this vessel.

Polly was so caught up in her own head that she nearly missed Dorothy's question. The woman had an authoritative tone to her voice, as if she was always speaking to a classroom of children or a conference room full of competent, but ultimately undisciplined subordinates. She naturally felt the urge to cow herself before the soldier. However, she'd learned a while ago that the people who surrounded her, even if they didn't exactly hold her in high regard, still put on a degree of wary respectfulness around her. Even though Dorothy'd certainly already read her dossier, Polly decided to be as personable as she could, not wanting to get off on the wrong foot as soon as she'd met who she assumed to be a rather big deal. "Polly. My name is Polly K. Delilah. I've got little formal training, but I'm excited at the prospec-... proscept... idea of working with AEGIS." She waited to be prompted to speak again, deliberately putting on a relatively subservient act - although her mispronounciation of "prospect" (she wasn't exactly familiar with the word yet) had certainly diminished the woman's estimation of her character.



Kiara had grown a head shorter. Her wounds had not been tended to, her equipment had not been relieved from her person. She had Link to thank for that, and she meant it sincerely. God, she... Tenzma still wasn't doing well, and nobody could even be permitted into his room besides the Queen's attendants because they'd all seen her blood; they were all still liable to harm him if they saw him, if not outright end his life. She felt like a mollycoddled child. The world punished those who hurt her regardless of whether she wanted them to be hurt or not. Even if it was an accident, even if the deed had been committed by someone she loved, the result was always the same. Hatred, fury, guilt, grief. All of that shame and wrath should've stayed inside her, she thought. Her whole body buzzed; every time she bled it felt pervertedly good. It was a fact that she would admit to nobody, and one which she'd forgotten - she'd not bled in a very long time. Yet, after waking up, she had felt refreshed, like a poison had been extracted from her. The pleasant buzz, however, was more than made up for by the crushing remorse that she felt for daring to feel good about hurting someone.

But that was normal. Regrettably, she'd grown used to the feeling. It still felt as awful as ever - the sensation grew stronger ever time she felt it, if anything - but she could hide it well enough. So, even as her mind raced with self deprecating thoughts and thousands of condemning, lambasting voices, she stared off into the middle distance with a metal lump in her hands which she fiddled with absentmindedly, gouging it like a piece of butter and forming it into many shapes. A gazelle, a star, a hand, a cavalier; the final form mattered less than the process. "Link." She spoke without turning her head to face him, instead staring past his shoulder, either oblivious to or unworried about the social implications of doing so. "This is the first sunset I've seen on this planet. It's much dimmer than the one I had at home." Her eyes sparkled with wonder and nostalgia. Nobody would ever be able to see it; she had flattened toruses of tinted glass over her irises, just barely opaque enough that anyone who stared at her for too long felt only mildly uncomfortable, and her vision was only impeded to the point of being roughly as acute as that of a regular man. "The skies were purple there during the day, and nightshade purple in the evening. I never appreciated it until she showed me a good place to watch it from." Her voice cracked ever so slightly. "And my oceans were golden, and tasted like syrup. I loved it. But I loved her more."
Last edited by Menschenfleisch on Wed Feb 26, 2020 4:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

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